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Hitchcock had discovered the charms of the Sonoma Valley just before Maria, selecting Santa Rosa to represent an idealized small town in his suspense thriller
Shadow of a Doubt
. Hitchcock began shooting in Santa Rosa in August, the month before the Gurdins moved to town. That September, a second picture,
The Sullivans
, a drama about five Iowa brothers recruited in World War II, set up location shooting. The timing was either synchronistic or Maria knew the two movies were being filmed in Santa Rosa and maneuvered the house purchase to be in proximity. In either case, she took her four-year-old golden child by the hand and followed the film crews. “She went to all of the locations. I don’t know
how
she found out,” said Olga.
    When Maria would later talk about Natasha at this age, she described her as “always acting,” desperate to be in movies. According to Olga, four-year-old Natasha was a “natural” when she performed, but she was not movie-struck. Maria was the one stalking movie crews, seeking parts for herself and Natasha; Natasha “just went along.” Olga—who knew every star, studied drama in school, and got her Social Security card so she could work as an extra—was an after-thought. “I wouldn’t even come home from school. I’d know that wherever they’d be shooting, my mother and Natasha would be. So I’d walk over to some of the houses.” Olga was happy just to be included. “My mother made everything
fun.”
    The Gurdins had been in town a few weeks when Maria heard about a ten-year-old Santa Rosa girl “discovered” by Hitchcock in July. Edna May Wonacott, the “Cinderella Girl,” as she was dubbed in the
Santa Rosa Press Democrat
, was flown to Los Angeles for a screen test and given a part in
Shadow of a Doubt
. The end of October, Santa Rosa staged an “Edna May Day,” with a parade in her honor. Maria Gurdin became obsessed with Edna May Wonacott, following every nuance of her Cinderella story. Edna May, the bespectacled daughter of a grocer, had been downtown with two cousins, unaware Hitchcock was across the street, scouting for locations. She remembers: “We were standing on a street corner waiting for a bus—and him and Jack Skirball, the producer, were looking at the courthouse for angles. And then they turned around and started looking at me.” Maria read the front-page story in the newspaper, which reported that Hitchcock noticed Edna May because of her pigtails, asking her to sing a song for her screen test. Maria made mental notes, using Edna May as a role model for Natasha. The town went Edna May-mad. “People stopped by the market just to touch my dad.” Maria accelerated her efforts to get Natasha noticed by film crews. “She was a stage mother,” recalls a neighbor. “Push, push, push.”
    By Thanksgiving, Hitchcock and the crew from
The Sullivans
were gone. Natasha enjoyed simply being a child. She baked cookies outdoors in an electric play oven with her first and only friend, a neighborhood boy named Edwin Canevari. Edwin was small for his age, like Natasha, and fiercely loyal. “We played husband and wife,” he recalls. Maria trusted no one else to play with Natasha. “She was watching her all the time, even when we were playing out in the driveway.” Natashawas never a “physical” child, according to Maria: “She liked to play piano and do some artwork.” This was, to a degree, Natasha’s nature; the rest of her perceived delicacy came from being treated like a hothouse flower. The gypsy’s warning continued to haunt Natasha, further restricting her from physical activities. “Never did she go in the water,” pronounced Canevari. “She was deathly afraid of the water.” Maria encouraged Natasha to play the piano, taught her to embroider, and bought her the oven for her to sculpt with clay, heeding advice from Olga’s nurse in China, who told Musia that working with the hands “exercised” a child’s brain.
    Life in the Russian River