Free Natasha by Suzanne Finstad Page B

her extraordinary screen test was more than Maria’s gimmickry with a butterfly.
    Natasha missed the last half of first grade shooting
Tomorrow Is Forever
. According to child labor laws, child actors had to have three hours of schooling every day. Natalie studied on the set between scenes with a studio tutor. “The way it works,” recalls a kid actor who later worked with her, “[is] when the kids show up in the morning they go straight into wardrobe and makeup so they’re prepared. Then they go to the teacher. The teacher would have a time clock and you start doing your schooling. The assistant director’s job is to get that schooling out of the way—so they do it in increments. In about twenty minutes they would say, ‘Okay, we need Natalie.’ So she would go out and rehearse. Then they would say, ‘Okay, go back to school.’ While the lighting and everything is being done, the kid would be in school. It was very rare to get the whole three hours in.” “I had to take my lessons on the set during the times they were lighting the scene,” Natalierecalled, “so I learned to concentrate. If a lamp fell down I probably wouldn’t hear it.” Because she was underage, Natasha was also required to have a welfare worker and one of her parents with her on the set at all times. She was surrounded by an entourage of adults—her tutor, Maria, the welfare worker—in the middle of a sea of activity all day, every day, on the movie set. At night, Mud hovered about her like a hummingbird. The only time Natasha was alone was when she went to bed at night. Solitude began to frighten her.
    The emotional scene Natasha performed at her screen test was scheduled a month into filming. She anticipated it with “absolute terror,” traumatized by Mud’s pressure on her to cry on cue. Maria borrowed Olga’s tactic while Pichel was setting up the scene, reminding Natasha of her dead dog. Then she took it a step further. “Her mother would drag her behind a flat and tell her some
horrendous
story about tearing the wings off birds to get her hysterical, and then drag her back.” This would be the technique Maria used with Natasha from then on. “She would get me all worked up and say to the director, ‘Start shooting.’ ” Mud’s brutality was effective; Natasha sobbed on Welles’ shoulder in perfect German. Crying would remain her bête noire forever after.
    Natasha also had fun on
Tomorrow Is Forever
. Welles taught her magic tricks, “always pulling cards out of my pigtails.” She discovered she “loved grown-ups,” which was not surprising, for Mud had turned her into a miniature adult. Her best friend on the set was a dwarf named Shorty, Welles’ valet. “We became great pals, Shorty and I, and we kind of hung out together between takes,” she later recalled. “And I remember Claudette Colbert. She was always dieting. My mother used to be amazed that ‘Miss Colbert doesn’t seem to eat any food, she just drinks fruit juice and vegetable juice.’ She was thin as a reed. She had a little atomizer that she used to spray something—air, I think—into her eyes. She wanted them to sparkle. She was very sweet to me.” Natasha observed it all, noticing how Welles changed the lighting to suit him, studying Colbert, “learning how to be a better actress.” Welles taught her, by example, to keep a sense of humor about being a star. Colbert, her first female Hollywood role model, impressed Natasha as “kind and maternal… you felt that about her, not just in her performances but in life.” The same would be said, in the future, of Natalie Wood.
    Colbert became a mother figure to Natasha, in the movie and on set. “I always felt it sad somehow that in real life, Claudette never became amother, for she had so much to give that way.” Natasha found her “exceptionally sensitive and understanding and empathetic,” qualities noticeably absent in Mud. Colbert returned the compliment, describing Natasha as