'Natasha,' the bio of a Hollywood star

Associated Press Writer

If a screenplay were written about Natalie Wood's life, moviemakers would probably turn it down as too dramatic to be plausible.

But her life makes for an insightful, haunting, page-turner of a book as written by Suzanne Finstad.

Born Natasha Gurdin, the actress known as Natalie Wood was pushed into acting at age 4 by a Russian immigrant stage mother so desperate to turn her child into a Hollywood star that she tortured a butterfly to make her cry on cue.

Her mother succeeded and by the time Wood was 24, she had starred in classics including "Miracle on 34th Street," "Rebel Without a Cause," "Splendor in the Grass," "West Side Story" and "Gypsy."

The men in her life included Frank Sinatra, Raymond Burr, Elvis Presley and Warren Beatty, and twice she married Robert Wagner, the man she had predicted would be her husband after she passed him on the Fox lot when she was only 11.

Even her death was dramatic. She had a lifelong fear of dark water, caused by her mother's superstitions and by several movie stunts that went awry, and drowned at night in 1981 at age 42 under mysterious circumstances that Finstad spends 43 pages trying to unravel.

Finstad's heavily researched book (she interviewed almost 400 friends, co-workers and family members, but not Wagner) focuses on Wood's dual identity -- as the sweet Natasha who longed first to be a normal high-schooler and later a mother and wife, and as Natalie Wood, the mink-draped, sophisticated star who suffered from crippling phobias and never left the house without a full face of makeup.

Finstad tends to rely on the Natasha-Natalie metaphor a bit much, and the book can be slow in the beginning -- when the spotlight is really on Wood's disturbed, controlling mother -- but it picks up as soon as Wood hits her surprisingly rebellious teens.

The book makes the case that Wood was one of the last great studio stars, with the studio dictating whom she dated, what pictures she made and how she dressed. And it details how she struggled with this as well, veering between wanting to be the star her mother groomed her to be and a serious actress who worked with directors including her idol, Elia Kazan.

"Her role as James Dean's girlfriend in 'Rebel Without a Cause' not only established Natalie as a mature actress, she suddenly became her generation's idealized teen-age girl," Finstad writes. "She felt pressure, in public, to become the airbrushed fantasy figure smiling from the pages of fan magazines, to please everyone, to be perfect ... to look beautiful at all times, to be a star."

Ultimately, the book is an examination of an extremely talented and intelligent, yet vulnerable, woman whose life was mapped out for her long before she was old enough to have a choice.