KallMeKris

And Nicholas's father had been employed at the Primorsky Condor Chocolate Factory.

But when the Civil War broke out, he took up with the anti-Bolshevik civilian forces and he would be killed in a street fight between Red Army and white Russian soldiers in Vladivostok.

But after his death, the family then fled to Shanghai, then to Vancouver, and eventually settled in the United States by 1933, just like Nicholas's future wife.

And Nicholas found work as a carpenter

and a day laborer in San Francisco, but he was also an alcoholic.

Now, Maria was still Tatulov's wife when she and Nicholas began seeing each other.

You know?

But their eventual wedding took place in February, 1938, and Natalie arrived months later.

And Nicholas would rename the family Gurdon when Natalie was about a year old.

And the name Wood would come a bit later when studio executives picked it for her at the age of six.

And they named her that as a nod to director Sam Wood and to swap out the family name for something American audiences could pronounce.

So when they obtained US citizenship, Maria finally settled on one first name after cycling through several, including Mary, Marie, and Lucia.

And then a second daughter from this relationship, the third overall, third daughter overall, keep up, came along in 1946.

And they named her Svetlana, and she was born in Santa Monica.

And she'd later become known as the actress Lana Wood.

But it was the second child, the one the gypsy had supposedly prophesized, who consumed Maria's attention entirely.

Because Maria used to lean close and whisper to Natalie.

One ear got the fairy tale, fame, beauty, the whole world watching, and the other ear got the warning, stay away from dark water.

The prophecy left Natalie shaken from a very young age, and she carried it with her for the rest of her life, never once even learning to swim.

Every ambition Maria had never been able to fulfill herself, she just poured into Natalie specifically, and she would stop at nothing to make those dreams real.