Suzanne finstad natalie wood

Outrage.

Sheer, white-hot, overwhelming outrage. One of the many questions Suzanne Finstad’s searing biography of Natalie Wood raises is: at how many different places simultaneously can the reader direct it? Certainly not at the author’s writing style, which is incisively clear, insightful and sensitive; nor at the breadth or depth of her scholarship, which exposes a life lived behind many layers of carefully constructed lies as well as the total incompetence of the law enforcement team that had no interest in finding the truth of Ms. Wood’s last few hours on earth. Whether or not you are a fan of Natalie Wood, this book is a major eye-opener about abuse: abuse of children, abuse of power, abuse of the Hollywood star-maker machinery, and abuse of everything else along the way.

Of all the work she left behind, including the girlfriend in “Rebel Without a Cause” and the lead in “Inside Daisy Clover,” Ms. Wood’s crowning achievement must be her role as the luminous, tragic Maria in “West Side Story.” Since 1981, though, her other biggest claim to fame has been the infamous manner of her death at the young age of 42. Her drowning off the coast of Santa Catalina Island, two nights after Thanksgiving that year, triggered an abortive and severely bungled police investigation. If you were alive when the news of her death blasted over the media back then, your first and only thought was, “How in Hell did that happen??”

To understand the answer, it is necessary to peer behind the carefully constructed iron curtain of lies surrounding Wood all the way back to her birth. As told by author Finstad, the whole life of this old-fashioned movie star is actually an anti-Hollywood fable, a sick, twisted fairy tale where the wicked stepmother is the princess’s biological parent; Prince Charming becomes dangerous to his wife’s mental health as well as her safety; and that whole Happily Ever After thing turns deadly.

The author does an excellent job of analyzing not only the opposing forces in Wood’s personality that added to the tumult in her life, but what put them there in the first place. It begins with Natalia’s (as she was christened) total head case of a mother. Not to belittle what Joan Crawford’s daughter Christina endured at the hands of her own superstar parent, but as recounted painstakingly by Finstad, the quietly insidious emotional abuse that Wood’s narcissistic, overbearing, star-struck, Hollywood-worshipping monster-mother relentlessly loads onto her daughter as she grows up makes the infamous line “No—wire—hangers!!” in the Crawford biopic “Mommie Dearest” sound like a lullaby. Finstad’s careful reconstruction of the mother’s own psychology and treatment of her middle daughter, which obliterates the development of the child’s own personality, makes it completely plausible why Natalie Wood ended up accepting continuing abuse from various places within the Hollywood system all her life. (This same Hollywood system—personified by various directors, producers, agents, and so on—becomes a sort of institutionalized father figure who perpetuates and enhances the abuse begun by the mother so many years earlier.) Ms. Wood did have innate talent that she could turn on from a young age in front of people and cameras; but it is a tribute to her that as an adult, she learned to grow her own strength as well, or she would not have survived even as long as she did.

Wood was able to separate the movie star persona she had grown up thinking she truly was from the authentic human being she turned out to be only after years of therapy as an adult. Before getting there, she faced almost never-ending mistreatment. For example, the book recounts how, after experiencing success as a child actress, Wood makes the leap to becoming an adult actor, something most child actors never manage. In her mid-teens she becomes the sexual and emotional prey—there is just no other way to say it—of the unscrupulous 43-year-old director of the immortal “Rebel Without a Cause,” who strings her along for months about a role she desperately wants, with no promises of winning it. Back then, everyone who knew about it (the movie industry, not the general public) took this kind of behavior for granted, including the actresses who were preyed upon. The post-Harvey Weinstein reader demands, where was the outrage?

The author sensitively recounts how, even after years of therapy, Wood’s movie star persona (“The Badge,” as the actress herself calls it) keeps getting in the way of the lifestyle she really wants. A second marriage to the love of her life does provide her with happiness, but even that ends in the most truly horrifying of ways.

Regarding Wood’s drowning death, the book’s allegations remain only allegations, albeit damning ones. There is no smoking gun: no tell-tale film footage exists of how or why Ms. Wood fell off the boat before the water took her from this world. But in the way the law enforcement authorities subsequently botched the investigation; in the way some people involved evidently succumbed to misplaced hero-worship, intimidation, outright fear, or whatever kept them from speaking the full truth when it could have counted; in the way, as the author insists, nobody ever protected Natalie Wood: justice does not merely miscarry here; it literally hemorrhages.

By the end of the book, the reader is forcefully reminded of the final shot of Ms. Wood’s friend Robert Redford’s film “Quiz Show,” in which the camera pans across a studio audience laughing and clapping in slow motion for what the moviegoer now knows is a web of deceit, with the audience ultimately responsible. The biography’s indictment is perhaps more subtle than this movie’s, but the moral of the story is clear: Don’t believe everything you hear. Especially when it happens in Hollywood.