The Notorious Natalie Wood Vehicle Inside Daisy Clover is a Mesmerizing Mess
Natalie Wood was an unusually pure creature of Hollywood. As a tot, she taught us all to believe in Santa Claus and benevolent capitalism as the glamorous child star of 1947’s Miracle on 34th Street. As a teenager she served as a proxy for multiple generations of lovestruck boys and girls by obsessing over the moodiness and live-wire angst of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. She made for an iconic if not terribly convincing Puerto Rican teenager from the wrong side of the tracks in West Side Story and, in true iconic Hollywood legend form, died much too young, under tragic and mysterious circumstances that remain debated and clouded in suspicion even today.
Wood’s death was a star-studded Hollywood mystery. Her life was at once a triumph and a tragedy. Decades after her premature passing Wood remains a tabloid fixture, with newspaper rags resurrecting her case every couple of years to howl for justice on her behalf since the grave has robbed her of her agency, her ability to speak up for herself.
Few actresses understood the almost unfathomable pain and torment that comes with child stardom as profoundly as Wood did. Wood understood deep in her bones and her dark, complicated psyche the infinite torment of premature fame, the special hell of being rich and beautiful and envied by the public in the world’s most glamorous profession yet writhing in psychological pain all the same.
Wood had experienced the best but mostly the worst of early superstardom in film. Show business was in her blood. Movies were in her DNA. The universe wouldn’t let her not be a star.
In that respect, Wood was an inspired choice for the juicy title role in 1965’s Inside Daisy Clover of a plucky, strong-willed young woman who is plucked from obscurity by a cruel film executive and elevated to instant super-stardom. It’s a terrific role, at once fierce and tender, angry and funny, defiant and aching for love and tenderness and acceptance. Wood is phenomenal as a woman who refuses to let the studio system destroy her. It’s a performance of operatic intensity that sometimes veers into camp but is never anything less than compelling.
On another level Wood was rather egregiously miscast as Daisy Clover because she was a 27 year-old Hollywood veteran and three time Oscar nominee who had been famous for nearly 20 years playing a 15 year old ragamuffin so wild and unschooled she’s borderline feral. Casting a woman that deep into her 20s as a girl barely into her teens engenders a distinct cognitive dissonance. Wood is a little like Roberto Benigni as a suspiciously balding “boy” puppet in Pinocchio but the casting of an actress so much older than the character she’s playing helps give the movie an oddly impressionistic, surreal quality, a sense that everything is heightened and exaggerated for melodramatic effect.
Wood’s Dickensian street urchin lives in a shack with a half-mad mother played by Ruth Gordon in one of her breakthrough roles. The mother in Inside Daisy Clover, nicknamed “The Dealer” due to her predilection for cards, represents one of the earliest and best incarnations of what would come to be known as the Ruth Gordon character, which would figure prominently in everything from Harold & Maude to a Clint Eastwood orangutan movie that found the Oscar-winner typecast as a crazy mama.
Inside Daisy Clover captures Gordon at her best, before her persona had devolved into campy shtick. Her daughter adores her. It’s easy to see why. She’s a true, unbroken wild child in a compromised and cynical world. So of course one of the first things Hollywood, as epitomized by evil film chief Raymond Swan (a regal and malevolent Christopher Plummer, oozing Satan’s own charm) does in the star-making/soul-crushing process is have the Dealer committed to a mental hospital so that power over the underage ingenue’s affairs can be transferred to Daisy’s fame-obsessed and malleable aunt.
Inside Daisy Clover is an unusually brutal exploration of Hollywood’s cruelty and genius for crushing the souls of the little people and elevating them to big, disastrous fame. Simply having the one person in Daisy’s life who genuinely loves and cares for her committed isn’t cruel enough, so Swan forbids his protege from ever seeing her mother and forces her to repeat, over and over again to the point of madness, a new studio-mandated-and-created bio that re-writes her history to make it more appealing and appealing to the public.
In Inside Daisy Clover, stardom involves gaining wealth, fame and celebrity but mostly it’s about losing — your identity, your sense of self, your home, the people closest to you, your independence, even your own name. As Daisy remarks ruefully, her name is just about the only thing she was able to retain when Swan and his evil minions decided to recreate her in the image of the girl next door, America’s valentine, a singing, dancing, grinning exemplar of everything that makes America great.
In Inside Daisy Clover, fame is a curse masquerading as a blessing. The street-smart Daisy figures out early on she’s in a rigged, dirty game and begins to rebel with the help of fellow rebel of the backlot Wade Lewis (Robert Redford), a fancy-talking playboy and matinee idol who drips verbose disdain for the town and industry that employs, empowers and imprisons him.
Redford oozes sex and danger as a libertine who sees life as a dirty joke without a punchline. He captivates and deflowers the underage Daisy, at which point he is punished/rewarded for his transgression with a quickie marriage to the 15 year-old girl. It’s only after they get hitched that Daisy discovers that she will have to compete, no doubt unsuccessfully, with men as well as women for her husband’s attention since the playboy and teen idol is bisexual.
Because show-business is unrelentingly cruel to the people that it professes to love, Daisy’s new husband ditches her almost instantly. Daisy’s life as a top Hollywood star loved by the masses and envied by girls the world over becomes a walking nightmare, a never-ending nervous breakdown that ultimately finds her cracking when called upon to re-record vocals for one of the chipper little ditties she croons in her vehicles for the umpteenth time.
In Inside Daisy Clover, the contrast between Clover’s real life — as an abused, mistreated and abandoned little girl whose life and career are controlled by sinister, much older men who see her as a sexual object and money-maker despite her youth and palpable despair — and her garish, onscreen life as a singing, dancing, prancing spark plug is at once comic and grotesque, gothic and poignant.
There’s a lovely scene where Daisy is dolled up, quite literally, in pancake make-up and a wig so that she looks like a human, sentient Raggedy Ann doll and Wade lovingly removes her awful white make-up, revealing the beautiful, hurting young woman behind the singing, dancing clown forced to perform for the cameras even when she’s dying on the inside.
Inside Daisy Clover is primarily a vehicle for Wood, who is as big and volcanic in spirit as she is diminutive physically. She’s a tiny little woman with a great big personality and massive screen presence. Director Robert Mulligan (To Kill a Mockingbird), producer Alan J. Pakula and screenwriter Gavin Lambert, adapting his own novel, surround Wood with even bigger personalities: Gordon as her heartbreakingly lost mother, Plummer as a figure of towering, Shakespearean evil, Redford at the height of his golden boy ripe sexuality and Wood’s fellow former child star Roddy McDowall as an oily Tinseltown operative who gets two of the movie’s biggest, coldest laughs just by referring to Daisy by first her married and then maiden name, in the process revealing just how he, and the rest of Hollywood sees her: first as a woman gullible enough to marry a man who prefers men and then as a woman who had been dumped.
Inside Daisy Clover sometimes recalls Mommy Dearest in the way it elevates vulgar camp to the level of genuine art but also in the way that the lead actress’ personal pain and famously rocky, dramatic history in show-business inform and enhance their performances in ways that can make watching both movies feel like a perversely voyeuristic endeavor.
Given the hardships Wood endured onscreen and off, it’s all too fitting that Inside Daisy Clover was a critical and commercial failure upon its release. As this column has no doubt illustrated, Hollywood never tires of seeing itself and its obsessions reflected onscreen but it tends to shun movies that expose brutal, inconvenient truths about the way the star-making process can destroy lives and push people to the very brink of suicide the way Inside Daisy Clover does. Hollywood generally wants to be razzed and spoofed and poked fun at. It does not want its heart of darkness exposed.
Yet it’s precisely that raw, unblinking, unrelentingly dark take on Hollywood as Hell on Earth and a brutal machine that chews up and spits out the young bodies and suggestible minds that makes Inside Daisy Clover so riveting and revealing today.
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