Natasha by Suzanne Finstad Read Free Book Online Page A

Pichel, and thus her life, might have been different. Instead she continued robotically, programmed by Mud to perform her piece. “She changed the subject by telling me that her name was Natasha Gurdin, that her birthday was July twentieth, that her parents were Russian and that she would like to sing me a Russian song, if I would like to hear it.”
    “I remember singing ‘In My Arms,’ with gestures,” said Natalie, years later.
“ ‘Comes the dawn, I’ll be gone. Ain’t I never going to have a honey holding me tight…’”
The Jewish director by chance understood Russian, according to Olga, “and he just fell in
love
with her.” Ironically, Olga had taught Natasha to sing “In My Arms,” and created the hand movements that charmed Irving Pichel. But it was Natasha with whom he was smitten, taken by “those eyes… she looks at you and you can read her thoughts.”
    Pichel was so enchanted with Natasha he offered her a small, non-speaking part in
Happy Land
. Mud’s improbable scheme to create the kismet that happened to Edna May had succeeded, establishing a precedent: if a formula worked, Mud copied it. The lesson for Natasha, from her staged encounter on Pichel’s lap, was more troubling. “I learned at an early age that if you are nice to men, you can get anything you want from them,” she said at thirty-one. After Natalie became famous, Maria would tell people Natasha was discovered by Pichel when he spotted her on the street, or that Natasha wandered away and impulsively jumped into Pichel’s lap—creating the deception thatNatasha’s first part, like Edna May’s, was an accident of fate. Natasha, Olga, Irving Pichel and Natasha’s friend Edwin knew differently.
    Nick, by Maria’s and Natalie’s later accounts, disapproved of his daughter being in the movie, though Olga recalls no such objection. Whether Nick objected to Natasha acting or not was of no real consequence, for as Maria baldly told a reporter in the mid-sixties, “I made all the decisions in the family.”
    Natasha’s cameo appearance in
Happy Land
required her to drop an ice cream cone in front of Marsh’s drugstore, where Don Ameche’s character worked as a pharmacist. The scene was to be shot in nearby Healdsburg, where the director had chosen a street with storefronts resembling middle America. An actress was hired to play Natasha’s screen mother, who was to pick her up after she dropped her cone.
    Natasha did not seem excited about being in the movie, according to both Olga and her chum Edwin. Her sister thought “she kind of took it in stride, she didn’t buck it or anything, she enjoyed acting.” Edwin’s impression was that Natasha was being pushed. “You could see it in her face when her mother would come out and say, ‘Natasha, come over here,’ or ‘Sit here,’ or do this, do that.” As an adult, Natalie seemed unsure how she felt, at four, about appearing in
Happy Land
. “Obviously I wasn’t shy, because I did what I was told.”
    It is perhaps revealing that she asked Edwin to go with her the day she was to shoot her scene. Pichel agreed to let Natasha’s friend appear in the movie with her, “playing a brother or something,” Canevari recalls:
    So my mother took me down to the set. When I got down there, there were all these big lights. And I was only about 5 years old—hell, I didn’t know what was going on. And I saw all these lights and they had these big sheets of metal making thunder and stuff, shaking them—and I took off running. It scared the hell out of me and I took off running and that was the end of me.
    Natasha, under pressure from Mud to do whatever the director asked, did not have the luxury of a child’s reaction. Upon hearing Pichel describe where on the sidewalk in Healdsburg he wanted Natasha to drop her ice cream and how to make it look natural,Maria asked the director: “With tears or without?” Musia even managed to get herself insinuated into the scene, walking