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She stayed away from the profession for two and a half years because she wanted to grow as a person. Stating That she had been working since she was a child, she told John Hallowell in The New York Times that ‘I had to have two years of just living.” She didn’t have to work, she was rich with a solid portfolio. A shrewd sense of art buying and collecting increased her millionaire status. Perhaps she knew she had drained herself of emotions to draw from artistically. Hollywood was surprised to learn she had turned down BAREFOOT IN THE PARK, with her most recent co-star Robert Redford, WOMAN TIMES SEVEN, which Shirley MacLaine did, and BONNIE AND CLYDE, with her old lover and leading man, Warren Beatty. To Hallowell, she admitted that working with Beatty “had been difficult before.” In ’79, she told Carolyn See of The Saturday Evening Post that at the end of her 20’s she felt empty, she’d worked for nothing.

Instead, she came back in her own project and with a film that summed up the 60’s. BOB AND CAROL AND TED AND ALICE (1969) was a movie she believed in because, as she told Hallowell, “It has an underlying sense of what I think is happening in America today with young married people. A kind of searching for deeper honesty underneath the comedy. And the character I play is closer to my own personality than any part I’ve ever played.” In lieu of salary, she worked for a percentage. She made two million dollars. Her own performance is the least effective and was overshadowed by film newcomers, Dyan Cannon and Elliott Gould (who were both Oscar-nominated), and by Robert Culp, her film husband who started the free-love idea.

Also, at this time (after previous engagements to film producer Arthur Loewe Jr. in 1965 and Ladislao Blatnick, a Caracus shoe manufacturer, in 1964), she finally married again: to British agent-turned-producer, Richard Gregson, who is Michael Craig’s brother.

She met Robert Wagner again at a Hollywood party in 1971, while she was pregnant with Natasha, and his marriage to Marion Marshall was breaking up. They were still mutually attractive to each other, realized they never should have gotten divorced and decided to remarry, which they did the following year, very shortly after her divorce.

The 70’s were spent mostly caring for her family. Wagner’s daughter, Katherine, by his previous marriage, lived with them and in 1974, the Wagners adopted Courtney, named after Wood’s character in THE AFFAIR, made the preceding year.

THE AFFAIR, an ABC-TV movie (1973), starred Robert Wagner, as a lawyer, in love with a polio stricken songwriter (Wood) who has never been in love before. Gilbert Cates was praised for his direction and the film scored high Nielsen ratings.

Her return to theatrical filmmaking in PEEPER (1975), starring her with Michael Caine, was an unfortunate attempt at a Bogart 40’s private eye drama. Evidently the writer, W. D. Richter, thought that by constructing a script (from the novel Deadfall) as confusing as THE BIG SLEEP, he would create a hit.

Another attempt by the Wagners to work together, CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (ABC-TV, 1976), this time directed by Laurence Olivier, defeated them. The nuances and heavy emotional undertones needed to interpret Williams were missing.

Wood thought she couldn’t combine the home and career and refused to work without Wagner. In a 1979 Saturday Evening Post interview with Carolyn See, she stated that she was naive in the 60’s and let other things get in the way of her marriage. She was determined that it wouldn’t happen again.

The NBC-TV production of FROM HERE TO ETERNITY, in which she played Karen Holmes, the frustrated housewife of an officer at Pearl Harbor, was well-regarded and she won a Golden Globe for her performance. Ironically, despite the years, it is no more intense than her earlier performances.

During the 60’s, Wood had hoped to bring two projects about mental illness to the screen, Hannah Green’s I NEVER PROMISED YOU A ROSE GARDEN and CASSANDRA AT THE WEDDING, scripted by Mot Crowley. For years, she had been in analysis, and wanted to express her interest in mental health. In 1979, for television, she was able to bring Joyce Rebeta-Burditt’s novel about a mad housewife, THE CRACKER FACTORY, to general acclaim. That same year, THE MEMORY OF EVA RYKER, about a woman who is the reincarnation of a woman drowned on the Titanic, was made for television and seen in 1980. Her last television film was a documentary shot in and about Leningrad’s Hermitage Museum with Peter Ustinov. A walk-on in the pilot of her husband’s hit series, HART TO HART, was a gag and she was billed under her real name.

THE LAST MARRIED COUPLE IN AMERICA (1980), a sort of updating of BOB AND CAROL…, was a moderate success but a critical failure. This study of the high rate of divorce and one couple who loved each other was smutty and crass.

The Wagners made headlines in early 1980 when an ABC lawyer, Jennifer Martin, accused Spelling-Goldberg productions (who produced Wagner’s HART TO HART) of denying the Wagners the $500,000 due them because of their 45% profit rights on CHARLIE’S ANGELS. A $30,000 “exclusivity” fee for each episode was being billed to ABC and that money was diverted to STARSKY AND HUTCH. The case was eventually dismissed by the judge handling the matter for lack of evidence but he was amazed at the vagueness of data on Hollywood deals.

In September of 1981, Wood began work on her last movie, BRAINSTORM, produced by MGM and with a considerable investment by Wood. Natalie was good in her role as the wife of industrial designer Christopher Walken. Her best scene is in the middle of the film, where she puts on the helmet developed by her husband, which records thoughts, relives her husband’s anxiety at losing her during a quarrel, and reconciles with him. Otherwise, she looks sophisticated, sleek and a bit sullen, as if she wanted to be remote from the whole enterprise. Louise Fletcher as the butch scientist has the showier role, and has the unforgettable heart attack.

Wood was aloof from the other people on the set and seemed uncomfortable with them, unless she was fully prepared for the occasion. Rather than the vivacious, mocking girl she was portraying, she spoke in a barely audible whisper before the press at the conference and in scenes on the set. She seemed ill at ease in the scene with Walken, their styles didn’t mesh.

Wood came alive at the wrap-up party (on location at Southern Pines, North Carolina) and patiently answered some of the local people’s questions, while she served champagne. Dressed in tight black satin slacks and high heels with a black low-cut angora sweater with pushed-up sleeves, she looked twenty years out of date. Her husband was on location with her, though not on the set, and freely golfed and fished with the local people. A reporter, Cos Barnes, asked her how she felt about the television remake of SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS, shown the night before, and starring another child star, grown up into adult roles, Melissa Gilbert. “Art is art,” Wood stated, “and we’re all in the same business.” She hadn’t seen it, however. She mentioned her excitement about appearing for the first time on stage that fall, in the title role of Anastasia in Los Angeles. All this time, fans were thrusting empty champagne bottles toward her to autograph, which she did delightedly. Just the same, there was a strained look about her. Seeing a woman near her who was also in the film, Wood asked if she wanted her to autograph a bottle. The woman, Marie Blood, was Houdini’s niece. “I don’t collect autographs. What would I do with them? Instead, I’d just like to hold your hand.” Wood smiled, perhaps the warmest of the whole day, and the two clasped hands.

One month later, on November 29, this woman who had told the people assembled at the film site how much she wanted to be with her children, slipped on the step of her yacht, the “Splendor,” hit her head against the side, and drowned in the small hours of the morning. She hadn’t finished BRAINSTORM, her husband was inside the yacht arguing about the film with its costar, Christopher Walken. She was alone.

Wood’s acting was compromised by her desire to remain always at her REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE level. She was far more real and candid as a child performer than she ever was as an adult. The flaw in her personality was that she really liked and was satisfied with the flashy post-WWII West Coast lifestyle. She was born there and died there, never really traveled (vacations were spent sailing in the area where she ultimately died), and was one of the few stars who rarely, if ever, filmed outside of the U.S. The criticism leveled at her in 1958 by Weiler was true of her to the end: her characters, though appealing, were never complex to begin with. Even in the scenes I observed shot on BRAINSTORM, she relied on kitten sexuality to convey the message. The most clearcut example of her failure to fathom characterization is BOB AND CAROL AND TED AND ALICE. Dyan Cannon took risks with her part, revealed real anguish in the psychiatrist’s scene, whereas Natalie Wood, even in her big scene where she tries to make her husband see her reasons for infidelity, plays it for bounce rather than anger and fear.

Wood was potentially one of the most talented performers to come to the screen. She had more working experience (she was one of the few who filmed at all of the studios operating after WWII) and learned from the best. The longevity of her career was based on her own business ability and the fact that she represented the average American girl, not woman. She was attainable and all could identify with her.

In trying to define her basic virtue, I am reminded of Robert Flaherty’s answer to why he liked Gloria Swanson, the ultimate movie star, the epitome of Hollywood commercialism and conspicuous consumption. “She has courage.” The same could be said about Natalie Wood. Both never appeared in degrading movies and spaced their appearances when they could not be used for greatest effect. With Wood’s death, a little more of the strength which made the Hollywood empire has been washed away.

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