Natalie Wood's first taste of fame came as a child when she racked up the lead role in 1947's Miracle on 34th Street. She would mature to come to be a three-time Academy Award-nominated starlet, however her mystical 1981 death has become her long lasting tradition. Pioneering gay writer Mart Crowley would additionally draw in global fame when his breakthrough and also questionable play, The Boys in the Band, opened up Off-Broadway in 1968. But to each various other, Wood and also Crowley were simply just the very best of buddies.
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| Natalie Wood and Mart Crowley's 20-Year Friendship |
Timber as well as Crowley fulfilled on the collection of 'Splendor in the Grass'
Edward Martino "Mart" Crowley was born on August 21, 1935, in Vicksburg, Mississippi. After graduating with a level in cinema from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. in 1957, he soon struck out for New York. The child of bad Russian immigrants, Wood began her performing job at age 4 and also was a leading Hollywood attract thanks to star kip down Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and The Searchers (1956 ). She wed fellow actor Robert Wagner in 1957.
When Wood and also Crowley first met, she was eager to be recognized as a serious actor and had fixed her hopes on the lead role in the 1961 Elia Kazan-directed melodrama, Splendor in the Grass. As a manufacturing aide on the film, several of Crowley's day-to-day jobs consisted of aiding Wood, usually accompanying her to the collection. "Therefore we spoke a dreadful great deal," Crowley claims in the 2020 documentary Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind. What began as a functioning connection rapidly changed into a relied on relationship and self-confidences were shared.
It was at that time Wood and also Wagner's marital relationship remained in chaos. A situation Crowley was privy to because of his very own growing psychological attachment to Wood. "It was clear to me there was problem in their marriage," Crowley stated. Wood and Wagner divorced in 1961 in the middle of reports of infidelity on Wood's part with Splendor co-star Warren Beatty. When Wood was cast in the big-screen adaptation of West Side Story (1961 ), she hired Crowley as her personal assistant, with the ambitious writer rapidly entering into Wood's inner circle.
Crowley upheld Wood's side through bumpy rides
Though Crowley would stay close friends with both Wood and also Wagner, his deep accessory to Wood was indisputable. Having matured in the Hollywood flick system, Wood watched out for go-getters, liking to border herself with those couple of she truly trusted. According to little girl Natasha Gregson Wagner in her memoir, More Than Love: An Intimate Portrait of My Mother, Natalie Wood, she "created a nucleus of individuals around her, including a lot of gay guys as well as others that felt marginalized, and my memory is that everybody was always discussing their sensations and also their emotions."
Crowley existed the night Wood tried suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping tablets. In the aftermath of her separation from Wagner and the claimed event with Beatty, a vulnerable as well as lonesome Wood reached a snapping point during the 1964 recording of The Great Race. "It was an overdose as well as a fifty percent. I indicate God Almighty she was out," Crowley informs Wood's daughter in What Remains Behind. "And I was told after they pumped her tummy they really did not understand whether she was mosting likely to pull through or otherwise. Yet she did."
Wood encouraged Crowley to create 'Boys in the Band'
In the following years, Crowley's profession failed, with Wood urging the writer to produce original work, ultimately bring about the development of Boys in the Band. "Natalie did assist me out when I was writing the play," Crowley informed Playbill. "And my job, such as it had actually been up to that factor, had been only sputtering failure. ... So, I was sort of stopped by agents and given up for dead. My profession was going nowhere. I truly didn't have any kind of cash. I house-sat in Beverly Hills for a really wealthy friend, the starlet Diana Lynn. I needed to do something with my time. So I wrote this play."
Debuting Off-Broadway in 1968, the play was hailed as groundbreaking because of its frank and also practical portrayal of gay characters. It played 1,000 performances as well as was a theatrical forerunner to the historic objections at New York's Stonewall Inn a year later on. In 1970 it was made right into a feature film while remaining to play in theaters around the world, and also in 2018 was restored for Broadway with a cast including Jim Parsons, Matt Bomer, Andrew Rannells, and Zachary Quinto, all of whom repeated their duties for a 2020 Netflix-release movie variation.
Crowley was almost with Wood the evening she inexplicably died
Crowley was present when Wood fulfilled British movie producer Richard Gregson, whom she married in 1969. When Wood brought to life daughter Natasha, it was Crowley that was picked to be the youngster's godfather. Timber and also Gregson applied for separation in 1971. Though Wood's occupation obtained a boost thanks to her duty in the 1969 film funny Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, as well as a Golden Globe-winning turn in the TELEVISION miniseries From Here to Eternity (1979 ), she invested much of her thirties in semi-retirement.
Timber and also Wagner remarried in 1972, with Wood telling People that Wagner had currently "come to be a male as opposed to a young boy." A little girl, Courtney, was birthed in 1974. "Both of them were stupefied with each other," Crowley claimed to CBS News. "I indicate they actually, actually enjoyed each other. As well as I assume that explains the reality that after they obtained divorced they went on to various other partners and had children, yet those marriages really did not exercise and also at some point, they discovered each other once more and also got back with each other. ... It's just misfortune the second marital relationship was finished the means it was, with her fatality."
It was Thanksgiving 1981 when Wagner, together with Wood as well as her then-Brainstorm co-star Christopher Walken, would take the household cruiser Splendour bent on California's Catalina Island. Crowley was invited to attend however had actually transformed the invite down. Timber as well as Wagner apparently argued aboard, apparently over the partnership between them and their costars, with Wood retiring to a cabin and Wagner incapable to situate her hrs later.
"I believe it's ridiculous," responded Crowley when asked by The Advocate regarding the resuming of the situation some 30 years later on. "It's profane to suggest that R.J. can have hurt her. There isn't a human getting on the face of the earth that he worshiped and loved more than Natalie." So persuaded, Crowley continued functioning straight with Wagner as a writer as well as manufacturer on the hit tv series Hart to Hart throughout the early 1980s.
Soon before his death in 2020 at age 84 from complications due to heart surgical procedure, Crowley got the Tony Award for best rebirth of a play for Boys in the Band. "I believe that was the highlight of his life," life-long friend Wagner told the New York Times upon his fatality. Keeping the family close, Crowley's day to the Tony Awards that evening was his goddaughter, Natasha.