Robert Downey Jr: “Kirk Douglas raped a teenaged Natalie Wood in the 50s” (Updated story)

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For the Kirk and Natalie stuff, bear with me. I think it will be worth it. A bit of my own creative backstory first should set the stage nicely:

Research and writing for my forthcoming historical crime novel Murder in Birdland continues, at an increasing and invigorating pace these past few months [Note: the Downey/Woods controversy started circa Spring 2018… though work on the novel is still going strong as of Spring 2019, as is the whole #metoo movement].

In the novel, Birdland club owner and record-industry mogul (and one-time boyfriend of Natalie Wood) Morris Levy reacts violently after his older brother Irving is killed by an unknown assailant, at their legendary jazz club in early 1959. This is our way into their world, and the wolrd of music and movie star wanna-be’s,  for an inside look at music and the Mafia in the early Sixties. I’ll do this through the eyes of a would-be sax player, Bill Pugliese, who works for Morris and witnessed the murder. We see it also, from a sideways angle, through the eyes the sax player’s girlfriend, Diane. She’s sort of an early Joni Mitchell, Patty Smith, Rickie Lee Jones type, who is befriended by Natalie Wood.

I had been on the fence about how heavily to incorporate real historical figures from that era in my novel (covering late 1958 thru perhaps the JFK assassination in ’63).

Natalie Wood, for example, briefly dated real-life music mogul Morris Levy, a central figure in the novel. So she’s definitely in (plus there is the West Side Story angle… more on that in a moment). My conundrum is about which other real celebrities to include or exclude, especially in the frequently overlapping fields of movies, television, music, politics, and literature. Not to mention how to feature a celebrity without letting them “take over” and possibly dwarf the characters I’m crafting. (Not to mention the challenge of blending reality and fiction while staying out of slander territory.)

I haven’t completely solved those problems yet, but it’s fun to play with the tension: how much can I safely blend fact and fiction?– or real historical personalities and invented characters, all with exaggerated traits, because I don’t really KNOW them, I only know their public personas. Or how to blend made-up fictional events with real documented historical moments, like hits on famous mobsters– all for the sake of my own original story. 

It’s all a test case for how short a memory Americans have. For instance, I just discovered a news item not from the past but in the near-present: the 2018 spotlight on centenarian Kirk Douglas as he got a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Golden Globes. It’s pushing me to create a more significant presence in my narrative for these two major entertainment figures of the era.

I was already including Natalie Wood, not just because she dated Morris “Moishe” Levy, but also because I’m featuring the IRL / actual 1959 Broadway and 1961 Hollywood performers and creators of West Side Story . This includes their actors, orchestra members and dancers –plus the stellar and renowned Gay Team who first created WSS: Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, choreographer Jerome Robbins, and playwright/screenwriter Arthur Laurents. Levy was then part owner of several other important NYC hangouts, plus he was the co-founder of Roulette Records. He also reportedly was a front for the Genovese crime family. As an “open secret”, the Mob controlled many important clubs and restaurants at the time in every major American city (plus Cuba), …not just New York, L.A. and Vegas.

(Side note: Levy finally was convicted of fraud in the 80s, but that’s another story… for when I get to Book 3 of the Birdland trilogy).

When Levy’s older brother Irving was killed, it was never clear if the murder was Mob-related, or just a random beef with a lowlife patron. Needless to say, for the sake of high drama, I’m going with the Mob angle. Plus it may have been the truth: that the killer was a hit-man but never confessed it. And it’s pertty well-established that Natalie Wood, it turns out, apparently had a thing for “bad boys” like Morris Levy, both before and after being involved with two-time hubby Robert Wagner (no angel himself). Bad Boys like Warren Beatty. And Dennis Hopper. And… well, even her much older director Nicolas Ray during the filming of Rebel Without a Cause… in which case it would have been statutory rape. So Nat was a bit of a bad girl looking for love, too.

Not that Natasha had a thing for Kirk… that s%!# was all on him!

Meanwhile, I also had already been including Kirk Douglas, since an important secondary theme is Hollywood’s communist blacklist (plus civil rights and other prejudices in the Ike and JFK eras), and the Mob’s major role in trying to strike a blow against communism. Case in point: Kirk’s self-produced big-budget movie Spartacus (1960). This was claimed by many as the first film to break Senator Joe McCarthy’s decade-old anti-communist Hollywood blacklist. By openly crediting blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo in 1960, Kirk’s actions as a producer put him at the center of a major change. American performers and intellectuals finally “broke” the McCarthy blacklist, and an era of actor-produced indie films began which now has reached the highest levels. So my bohemians-coming-of-age novel– with its  aspiring fictional actors, musicians, Mafia Soldiers, and radicalized students of Greenwich Village and Midtown– is a natural fit.

(Side note: see the Brian Cranston movie about Trumbo from 2016… It’s stupendous… As is the Coen Brothers’ more darkly comic treatment of secret commies and gays, in 2016’s very underrated Hail, Caesar!)

Kirk was quite powerful from the early 50s through the mid-60s, the same period during which the major movie studios were gradually losing their power to independent producers and other economic forces. And old prejudices were also under fire–whether for racial, homophobic, gender-based, political or ideological reasons. So in some respects, Kirk was very much the Harvey Weinstein of his day: re-making an industry as a major player, while behind closed doors he was abusing all of that power he had amassed, for his private amusement. Natalie was not likely the first, nor the last, and there are numerous reports of other Douglas #metoo moments, that were hushed up.

As for the resurgence of this particular, lesser-known Natalie Wood tragedy, it’s another sad chapter in the #metoo saga from 2017 through today… even though Wood’s situation reportedly occurred sometime in late 1955. Wood was just 16, and Douglas was “auditioning” her. He was one of the first Hollywood stars with enough clout to start a successful independent production company of his own. Earlier in 1955, strong rumors had circulated around town that Wood had been in a consensual affair with the much older Nicholas Ray, her director on Rebel Without a Cause. We will leave that one alone for the moment, since the ambitious but needy Nat was likely on-board with it… even though it IS pretty skeevy behavior on Nick Ray’s part.

On the other hand, the true “rough stuff” for Wood came when Douglas invited Natalie to his hotel room– theoretically to audition for a part in some upcoming film. (Not that he ever hired her… to add insult to injury.) She later told friends he said he had “always wanted her, and he didn’t take no for an answer”. The drunken rape by Douglas was reportedly fairly brutal, too. Wood was quietly taken to the hospital by her nut-job of a stage mother. This is the same mother who made her keep quiet, lest Douglas ruin her chance for a career as an adult actress. However, Natalie did tell a few people that she was close to, over the years. Plus her own family later, of course, including her daughter Natasha Gregson-Wagner …..which brings us FINALLY to Robert Downey Jr., and 2018. And in 1997, again in Hollywood/New York.

Downey was in the film Two Girls and a Guy with occasional actress Gregson-Wagner and actress/novelist Heather Graham sometime in the 1990s. Downey and Gregson Wagner/Warner became friends from that point onward. With both Natasha and Robert being children of famous movie figures from the 1960s (Robert Senior was more of a radical experimental/political filmmaker on the New York scene in the 60s), their enduring friendship only makes sense in retrospect. So apparently Natasha told Robert about her mother’s rape, …and now that Robert is safely back on top in Hollywood (having been WAAAAAY down near the bottom in the 1990s, with his own drug and domestic problems), he took it upon himself to quietly call foul on Douglas and other Hollywood hypocrites. The occasion was the 2018 Golden Globe awards, which honored Douglas, who was then 101 years old and appeared onstage at the awards with his daughter-in-law Catherine Zeta-Jones.

For the whole convoluted explanation of how it is somewhat provable that Downey was the “anonymous” commenter on an important Hollywood blog, I’ll direct you to the link below, rather than directly explain all the cloak and dagger research.

Gawker points to the Downey-Douglas-Wood story

So… the plot thickens, as they say. And more to come, I’m sure.

Now for me to decide, among other conundrums:

1. How intimate did Wood get (consensually) with my guy, Morris Levy, yet another much older man, after the alleged rape?
2. Should I creatively “bend the truth” about either real person (Wood & Levy)? or their sexual proclivities? Did they date? Or cheat? Or –more accurately– did SHE cheat on whoever she was with at the time?…since I already know that Levy cheated, before and after, with any number of partners. Adultery was de riguer for mobsters, as The Sopranos portrayed quite well in the 1990s.
3. From a believable, fictional character perspective, how “damaged” was Natalie?, What can I say that  both honors her, but tells some hard truths? How was she damged before Kirk, and then after the Kirk Douglas rape? She’d already been damaged, in my opinion, due to her family’s increasing economic and emotional dependence upon her. Plus by the whole Hollywood studio system that she grew up within, especially Louis B. Mayer? Chewing up female child actresses was especially true at MGM, which specialized in screwed-up child stars. Elizabeth Taylor, Debbie Reynolds and Judy Garland all certainly got more tabloid ink about their romantic exploits in their teens and early 20s than Natalie Wood. But between Nat’s fake “dating” of secretly gay actor/singer Tab Hunter (to sell tabloids and movie tickets), and her ups and downs with Robert Wagner, Natalie was clearly a drama queen as well. She and Louis B. Mayer used each other, let’s say– because she thrived upon the attention and perks that stardom and publicity (and Louis!) provided. Although extremely talented, Natalie was famously a very insecure and yet sexually adventurous person. She was both a victim, and in some ways a “player”, herself. One look at her volatile relationship with infamous Hollywood horndog Warren Beatty in the early Sixties suggests this as well.

Granted, I am writing fiction. Fiction plays by different rules than journalism, documentaries, and courtrooms. But still, I’d like my characterizations to be true to history. The real actresses and mobsters will still necessarily be my own versions of those real people– but not entirely accurate. They’re also my own fictionalized amalgams of various representative figures from the era… Natalie could have been Debbie Reynolds, or Liz Taylor, or even Ava Gardner from a slightly earlier era (Gardner ALSO makes a number of cameo appearances in Murder in Birdland, and was friendly with some of the major Birdland figures and other players on the New York music scene… she even had the hots for Miles Davis, big time!) However, my goal is to ethically create honest, realistic characters. I want to speak respectfully AND truthfully, without resorting to cheap and sordid sexual fireworks. Besides, it’s already a finely woven work of fiction, with several romantic subplots between ENTIRELY fictional characters. So it’s really not so much about Natalie Wood or Kirk Douglas anyway… nor should it be. They are quirky “bit” players, at least in MY book.

But on the other hand, I can’t see leaving the Douglas rape or the Levy affair out, either. Which makes all three of them look pretty bad, in vaious ways. What happens to young people often forms or scars them for life. Especially between the ages of 13 and 20, at the height of puberty, when everyone builds out their gender and sexuality ideas in their own unique way.

Natalie’s rape at 16 is a historical fact. There would have been hospital records. Serious journalists and biographers, and Wood’s own sister, have confirmed it.

What rumors the internet digs up, suggests, or else completely fabricates and perpetuates long afterward is a different question.

Whether or not the rape directly affects my plot, there’s no doubt that it indirectly affected her personal relationships and career from that day forward.

So what’s a stand up guy like me to do? When Downey– one of my heroes in a way– is at odds with Kirk Douglas, …who I also until recently thought was pretty terrific. 

I’m at a crossroads. ?????

Short answer, though: it’s not either/or with Kirk: he’s BOTH heroic AND a villain. Heroic for his progressive politics, for his acting talent–consistent even when the written material was not great. Also merits praise for his other positive qualities, like the freedom of speech stuff, and breaking the studios’ tight grip on movie content. Plus I sure would have loved to hang with him at the beach for a day, drinking and swimming and telling stories. His children clearly loved him, and probably with good, very human reasons for doing so.

AND YET, Kirk’s a s#%! for his hush-hush sex crime. Right? Which is it?

Hero and villain. Both can be true. I choose to believe both ARE true.

Thus now, for me at least, Kirk has gone the way of Kevin Spacey, Bill Cosby and Louis CK: massive talents with equally massive ethical/sexual blind spots, or else repugnant mental disorders and addictions.

Another side note: I’m still bothered about our rumor-addicted contemporary society’s apparent (and perhaps twisted) *need* to find a scapegoat , and how we love to eventually tear down these monumental but flawed men and women (more often men, of course… “Sorry”, on behalf of my bros, ladies!).

But if it’s all true (and I believe it is), then as with the McCarthy blacklist and the Confederate flag, it’s time for the rest of us to lead the way toward a brighter future. Here’s hoping that new performers following in the footsteps of Douglas, Cosby and the others (in good or destructive ways… like, can you say Charlie Sheen?… who else, more recently?) can conquer their personal demons. Like Robert Downey Jr. did. Some may need to be jailed, but just as importantly, they–and we all– need to get some help fixing our heads. Will the new crop of Bad Boys caught red-handed eventually recover some semblance of a reputation and/or career?

You tell me. Because I dunno where America is headed, not politically, not artistically!!!! Does anyone?

That is, can they recover, if we are willing to let them recover?… Those stories are often more boring than repeating the fall-from-grace stories. Which is an interesting pyscho-social question of its own. But I’m afraid it’s a question for another day.

All this has been turning up, of course, in my ongoing research for my 50s jazz-and-the-movies novel, Murder in Birdland.

Tune in again here for more hot gossip from the Late 40s or early Fifties…

Oy vey… Can you say #stuckinthepast ?