Hollywood: Up from Happyland

As sinuous as a salamander, the young woman flexed her junior-miss body, tossed her carefully . tousled strato-cumulus hairdo, and took a long drag on a Kool. “I’ve done lots of lousy films, but I hoped they would be good,” she said. “Now I’ve done two pictures I know are good, and it’s affected my whole life. For the first time I come home after work tired but exhilarated, instead of tired and depressed.”

Natalie Wood has every reason to feel exhilarated: at 23, she is just about the raciest filly to come down the Hollywood sound track since Liz Taylor. Her new pictures, both slated for mid-October release, are Splendor in the Grass, a bitter harvest of frustration and failure written by William Inge and directed by Elia Kazan, and West Side Story, the widescreen, cinema version of the Broadway musical tragedy, in which Natalie enacts the poignant role of Maria with a carefully coached Puerto Rican accent and dubbed-in songs.

Geometry Problem. The two films represent a total investment of $9,000,000—the best possible proof of Hollywood’s growing confidence in Nat Wood. And with a contract calling for as much as $250,000 per film, she can afford the white Cadillacs and 50-carat trinkets so essential to the happiness of a top-ranking movie queen.

There are other signs that Natalie has arrived. Her first marriage, to Actor Robert (“R. J.”) Wagner, is on the rocks. She is running with The Clan, undergoing psychoanalysis, and reading Freud. And she is enmeshed in one of the most complicated problems in romantic geometry in Hollywood’s long history. In the current quadrangle (the old eternal triangle is from squaresville), Natalie’s most attentive admirer is Warren Beatty, her leading man in Splendor, who was long the fiance of Britain’s Joan Collins. Joan, in turn, is the current inamorata of Wagner, who is also a good friend of Warren’s.

Natalie did not reach the top rung in one leap: she has been in films for nearly 20 years. Most of her credits are best forgotten, but there were enough big hits —Miracle on 34th Street, Rebel Without a Cause, Marjorie Morningstar—to keep her career moving upward. It began in Santa Rosa, Calif., when four-year-old Natalie—then Natasha Gurdin—went with her Russian-immigrant mother to watch the filming of Happyland. Even then she was a raving beauty, and Director Irving Pichel plucked her out of the crowd to give her a bit part. In her next, Tomorrow Is Forever, she swiped scene after scene from Orson Welles, and soon established herself as a $1,000-a-week child star. Roared Orson: “She’s terrifying.”

Nat matured into a diminutive nymphet (5 ft. 2 in., 96 Ibs.) and got through the awkward years without the usual career intermission. With two other young aspiring actors, she formed a kind of small-scaled study group of her own; the three acted plays in the living room, roamed out into the town to test their skills, improvising scenes on park benches and in crowded bars, making speeches before street loungers to see how well they could handle audiences. Her first big-girl role (at 16) was opposite James Dean in Rebel; it won her an Oscar nomination and a smooth transition into grownup films.

Off-camera, Natalie became a well publicized Hollywood playgirl. She had a large fling with Nicky Hilton, after Liz Taylor divorced him. She danced and dallied with Jimmy Dean, was often observed on the jump seat of Elvis Presley’s motorcycle, and married Wagner in a ceremony that was decorous enough to make some pressagents think it was for real.

His-and-Hers Pools. But Natalie was no homebody (“Sure, I’m domestic. I can call room service”). And when it came to interior decorating, she was worse. In a costly attempt to convert the Wagners’ colonial mansion into a Beverly Hills Parthenon, she capriciously fired three contractors. The result was a Pompeian extravaganza: the ornate staircases wobbled, the floor under Natalie’s bathroom (with its sunken 6-ft.-square tub) sagged, the ceiling fell on the enormous canopied bed. Flaky plaster sifted down on Natalie’s 20-ft. marble dressing table, sank into a 6-in.-deep sheepskin rug, powdered the antique balustrades cut from the top of Marion Davies’ beach castle in Santa Monica, drifted across the lanai, with its his-and-hers swimming pools (Nat’s adorned with an antique Grecian female statue, R.J.’s with a Greek male). The result was almost too predictable; the house and the Wagners’ marriage fell apart simultaneously.

Last week Natalie was on “leave of absence” from her studio until she tidied up her marital and household affairs. War ner came up with a new gimmick to herald Splendor—a special one-day showing “to allow time for the film to be discussed, to be highly praised or hotly attacked” four weeks in advance of its regular release.

As for herself, Natalie can hardly wait. She fervently hopes that Splendor will at last wipe out the image of the child star that still lingers on among TV viewers of her old movies, which are still running on the late, late shows. Says she: “Those things haunt me. People are always bugging me by saying ‘My, how you have grown!’ You’d think they expected me to stay seven years old.” But her anxiety is needless. As any studio executive or reader of the gossip columns could have told them, Nat is a big girl in Hollywood now.