Natasha by Suzanne Finstad Read Free Book Online Page B

behind Natasha—portending her role in her daughter’s life. “Like having a shadow following you around,” as Canevari put it. The genial Pichel included Olga in the background, pairing her with a young man from Annapolis.
    Maria made sure everyone would be looking at Natasha. She dressed her in a tiny frock, doing her hair in Shirley Temple ringlets with an enormous white bow, like Dainty June, the baby doll character in
Gypsy
, Natalie’s future film. Olga remembers dressing in the trailer with Ann Rutherford, the actress playing Don Ameche’s wife, who picked up Natasha and hugged her, one of the few memories Natalie would have of
Happy Land
. By the time she dropped her cone, precisely where she was asked, Pichel was beguiled by the little Russian girl who curtsied each time he appeared.
    Maria kept Natasha deliberately underfoot the rest of the
Happy Land
shoot, hoping to further ingratiate her to Pichel, “and I fell, I must confess, violently in love with her,” he wrote later. According to Maria, Pichel sent attorneys to the house with legal papers to adopt Natasha, a story that would become part of Natalie Wood lore. Natalie herself repeated it, as an adult:
    He said to my mother, “Oh, your daughter is so adorable, I’d love to adopt her. What would you think of that?” My mother thought he was joking. She speaks, still, with a heavy Russian accent and sometimes she doesn’t quite understand or make herself understood. So she thought he was joking and he thought that she was serious. The lawyers arrived at our house one day while the “Happy Land” filming was still going on… there was a big upheaval in the household.
    How much of the story is true, or Maria’s tall tale, is open to question. Olga, who was fourteen that summer, recalls Pichel visiting once, but there were no attorneys at the house. Her impression was that Pichel wanted a daughter because he only had sons, and that Natasha had requested a bunk bed if she moved into his house. But Olga is uncertain whether she heard this conversation, or if her mother told her about it later. “He
wanted
to adopt her, that I
know
. And Motheragreed, but then she told him of course it was a joke.” In a later, highly suspicious version, Maria told the author of a book on celebrity mothers that Pichel wanted to
buy
Natasha and offered his life savings. (“I said, ‘No, I don’t sell my children,’ ” she recounted with great drama.)
    Pichel, who was married with sons fourteen, nineteen, and twenty-two at the time, never mentioned to his children the possibility that Natasha might be adopted into the family. Nor did their mother. “It was probably folklore,” suggests the middle son, Dr. Julian Pichel, though he concedes his parents “did want a daughter—that’s true. I think that’s why I was called ‘Julie.’ ” All three brothers doubt that their mother, who resented the movie industry, would have consented to the adoption. Marlowe Pichel, who was fourteen, speculates his father may have wanted to help Natasha. “I do remember he was kind of smitten with her,” relates Julian. Pichel talked openly about his affection for Natasha in a magazine piece several years later, never mentioning wanting to adopt her. “I seriously believe it’s a complete fabrication,” declares Natalie’s younger sister, Lana, who heard their mother spin the yarn over the years. Natasha’s “memory,” at four, of attorneys creating an upheaval may have been implanted by Maria. Whether or not he tried to adopt her, Pichel’s fondness for Natasha was unique, according to Julian, who never knew his father to form an attachment to any other child actor. “There must have been something special about Natalie.”
    Pichel stopped at the Gurdins’ to say goodbye to Natasha when he finished filming
Happy Land
around her fifth birthday, which was on July 20, 1943. The story that would appear throughout Natalie’s later movie career is that Pichel promised,