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| Nick Ray and Natalie Wood |
I recently re-read these stanzas in James Franco's "Chateau Dreams" from his book of prose Directing Herbert White:
In '54, forty-three-year-old Nick Ray
Fucked fifteen-year-old Natalie Wood in Bungalow 2
Sam Kashner related in a 2005 Vanity Fair piece: "Natalie Wood desperately wanted the part [in Rebel Without a Cause(1955)], but at 16 she had played only juveniles [...] Ray [the film's director] was immediately drawn to Wood, Gavin Lambert recalls. “She was very young, and that was always attractive to Nick,” he says [...] “How quickly did Natalie realize that he found her extremely desirable, and how soon did Nick make his move? … The interview took place in the first week of February, and by the time she made her first screen test, ten days later they were lovers,” recalls Lambert."
In addition, Kashner wrote: "Wood’s affair with Ray awakened her sexuality—and emboldened her to initiate another love affair, this one with Dennis Hopper, who had been cast as Goon. “I was astonished,” Hopper later said. “I came from a very conventional, middle-class family in San Diego … and this was the 1950s, when girls who’d turned sixteen only a few months earlier just didn’t do things like that.” The sexually charged situation created ill will between Ray and Hopper."
Franco wrote that Wood was fifteen, but Kashner wrote that she was sixteen. I don't know Franco's source, but Hopper may have clarified the issue by sharing that when he began his affair with the nymphet she had "turned sixteen only a few months earlier". That supports Franco's position, because it could take months for a film to start shooting after a "screen test".
And if you've read The Allure of Nymphets and this blog, you're well aware that Wood is no nubile nymphet anomaly. Wood's sexuality had been awakened long before she had sex with Ray and the fact that she initiated an affair with Hopper so soon after having sex with Ray, leads one to believe that she was no virgin before she entered Bungalow 2.
And if you've read The Allure of Nymphets and this blog, you're well aware that Wood is no nubile nymphet anomaly. Wood's sexuality had been awakened long before she had sex with Ray and the fact that she initiated an affair with Hopper so soon after having sex with Ray, leads one to believe that she was no virgin before she entered Bungalow 2.
God knows how many nymphets had sex in the infamous Chateau Marmont, but Glenys Roberts related in a Daily Mail post that: "A 19-year-old Scarlett Johansson was so overcome by its heady atmosphere in 2004 that she couldn’t wait to get upstairs with [thirty-seven-year-old] Puerto Rican star Benicio Del Toro and ripped off his clothes in the lift. ‘We were making out or having sex or something,’ she readily admitted later."
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| Scarlett Johansson and Benicio Del Toro |