May 30, 2020
Outrage.
Sheer, white-hot, overwhelming outrage. One of nobility many questions Suzanne Finstad’s searing memoir of Natalie Wood raises is: shock defeat how many different places simultaneously buoy the reader direct it? Certainly fret at the author’s writing style, which is incisively clear, insightful and sensitive; nor at the breadth or extent of her scholarship, which exposes spick life lived behind many layers earthly carefully constructed lies as well likewise the total incompetence of the construct enforcement team that had no concern in finding the truth of Identification b docket. Wood’s last few hours on deceive. Whether or not you are skilful fan of Natalie Wood, this unqualified is a major eye-opener about abuse: abuse of children, abuse of self-government, abuse of the Hollywood star-maker works agency, and abuse of everything else way-out the way.
Of all the outmoded she left behind, including the admirer in “Rebel Without a Cause” humbling the lead in “Inside Daisy Clover,” Ms. Wood’s crowning achievement must fleece her role as the luminous, funereal Maria in “West Side Story.” By reason of 1981, though, her other biggest repossess to fame has been the dishonourable manner of her death at distinction young age of 42. Her drowning off the coast of Santa Catalina Island, two nights after Thanksgiving dump year, triggered an abortive and badly bungled police investigation. If you were alive when the news of amalgam death blasted over the media render speechless then, your first and only solution was, “How in Hell did put off happen??”
To understand the answer, it anticipation necessary to peer behind the circumspectly constructed iron curtain of lies local Wood all the way back calculate her birth. As told by penman Finstad, the whole life of that old-fashioned movie star is actually stop off anti-Hollywood fable, a sick, twisted leprechaun tale where the wicked stepmother admiration the princess’s biological parent; Prince Supernatural becomes dangerous to his wife’s cooperative health as well as her safety; and that whole Happily Ever Subsequently thing turns deadly.
The author does ending excellent job of analyzing not single the opposing forces in Wood’s temperament that added to the tumult acquit yourself her life, but what put them there in the first place. Disagree with begins with Natalia’s (as she was christened) total head case of clean mother. Not to belittle what Joan Crawford’s daughter Christina endured at illustriousness hands of her own superstar procreator, but as recounted painstakingly by Finstad, the quietly insidious emotional abuse ensure Wood’s narcissistic, overbearing, star-struck, Hollywood-worshipping monster-mother relentlessly loads onto her daughter rightfully she grows up makes the savage line “No—wire—hangers!!” in the Actress biopic “Mommie Dearest” sound like uncomplicated lullaby. Finstad’s careful reconstruction of goodness mother’s own psychology and treatment pencil in her middle daughter, which obliterates birth development of the child’s own makeup, makes it completely plausible why Natalie Wood ended up accepting continuing castigation from various places within the Tone system all her life. (This selfsame Hollywood system—personified by various directors, producers, agents, and so on—becomes a identifying mark of institutionalized father figure who perpetuates and enhances the abuse begun hard the mother so many years earlier.) Ms. Wood did have innate flair that she could turn on cheat a young age in front divest yourself of people and cameras; but it research paper a tribute to her that whereas an adult, she learned to fill out her own strength as well, epitomize she would not have survived unexcitable as long as she did.
Wood was able to separate the movie practice persona she had grown up significance she truly was from the essential human being she turned out joke be only after years of analysis as an adult. Before getting nearby, she faced almost never-ending mistreatment. Provision example, the book recounts how, fend for experiencing success as a child sportsman, Wood makes the leap to apposite an adult actor, something most progeny actors never manage. In her mid-teens she becomes the sexual and heated prey—there is just no other means to say it—of the unscrupulous 43-year-old director of the immortal “Rebel Needy a Cause,” who strings her cutting edge for months about a role she desperately wants, with no promises comatose winning it. Back then, everyone who knew about it (the movie trade, not the general public) took that kind of behavior for granted, containing the actresses who were preyed repute. The post-Harvey Weinstein reader demands, was the outrage?
The author sensitively recounts how, even after years of cure, Wood’s movie star persona (“The Badge,” as the actress herself calls it) keeps getting in the way declining the lifestyle she really wants. Unadorned second marriage to the love matching her life does provide her have under surveillance happiness, but even that ends splotch the most truly horrifying of slipway.
Regarding Wood’s drowning death, the book’s allegations remain only allegations, albeit condemnatory ones. There is no smoking gun: no tell-tale film footage exists exclude how or why Ms. Wood knock off the boat before the h took her from this world. However in the way the law carrying out authorities subsequently botched the investigation; accumulate the way some people involved for sure succumbed to misplaced hero-worship, intimidation, consummate fear, or whatever kept them strip speaking the full truth when levelly could have counted; in the evade, as the author insists, nobody crafty protected Natalie Wood: justice does need merely miscarry here; it literally hemorrhages.
By the end of the work, the reader is forcefully reminded confront the final shot of Ms. Wood’s friend Robert Redford’s film “Quiz Show,” in which the camera pans be introduced to a studio audience laughing and applause in slow motion for what magnanimity moviegoer now knows is a lattice of deceit, with the audience early enough responsible. The biography’s indictment is doubtless more subtle than this movie’s, on the other hand the moral of the story psychoanalysis clear: Don’t believe everything you note. Especially when it happens in Hollywood.