Natasha: The Biography of Natalie Wood by Suzanne Finstad

Description

After twenty years, the story of Natalie Wood's extraordinary life and mysterious death is revealed in a riveting new biography We watched her mature on the movie screen before our eyes in Miracle on 34th Street, Rebel Without a Cause, West Side Story, Splendor in the Grass, and on and on. She has been hailed, along with Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, as one of the top three movie actresses in film history, a legend in her own lifetime and beyond. But the story of what she endured, of what her life was like when the doors of the soundstages slid closed, has long been obscured. Natasha is based on years of exhaustive research into Natalie's turbulent life and mysterious death. Suzanne Finstad conducted more than four hundred interviews with Natalie's family, close friends, legendary costars, lovers, film crews, attorneys, police officials, and Dr. Thomas Noguchi, the coroner who investigated her strange death by drowning. Finstad has reconstructed a life of emotional abuse and exploitation, of almost unprecedented fame, great loneliness, and loss. Finstad tells this tragic beauty's story with sensitivity and grace, revealing a complex and conflicting mix of fragility and strength in a woman who was swept away by forces she could not control. Natasha is the definitive biography of Natalie Wood.

Editorial Review

Natalie Wood (1938-81) came from the last generation of movie stars shaped by the Hollywood studio system, and Suzanne Finstad gives her life the all-out showbiz celebrity bio treatment in this compulsively readable book. As Finstad sees it, Wood was tortured by the conflict between her real self, born Natasha Zakharenko to Russian immigrants, and the glamorous “Natalie Wood” persona created by her ambitious mother. Wood admired rebellious actors like James Dean, her co-star in Rebel Without a Cause, but she wanted the mink coats, sexy cars, and huge salaries Warner Brothers doled out for appearances in forgettable pictures like Sex and the Single Girl. Working in films from age 6, she learned early that the way to get ahead was to please the grownups, a lesson she never really unlearned, even in her wild teens. She ditched a fiancé‚ deemed unsuitable by the studio, to marry suave rising star Robert Wagner, despite warnings from friends that he was bisexual; their first marriage ended when she found him “in a compromising position with another man,” but they reunited in 1972 to become Hollywood's golden couple once more. But her attraction to more challenging artists remained; her friendship with Brainstorm co-star Christopher Walken sparked the drunken quarrel that in Finstad's account led to Wood's drowning off Wagner's boat. (Chillingly, she had a lifelong fear of water.) Numerous quotes from practically everyone who ever knew Wood evoke Tinseltown's gossipy atmosphere, and Finstad's overwrought prose (she describes Wood as “bound to her mother, as if Maria were a snake coiled around her neck”) sustains an appropriately high-pitched mood. Suicide attempts, reckless driving, excessive drinking, rape by an unnamed Hollywood star are all chronicled in detail that might be distasteful if the author weren't so sympathetic towards her vulnerable heroine. –Wendy Smith