Natalie Wood: The Mysterious Death Of A Hollywood Icon
November 29th, 1981, about 7:30 a.m. The body of Hollywood star Natalie Wood is discovered floating face down in the Pacific Ocean. She is wearing a flannel nightgown, blue wool socks, and a red down jacket. The rubber dinghy of her yacht Splendour is found washed up on the rocks a little further south.
What happened to her? Nearly forty years later, the question still stands.
Who Was Natalie Wood?
Natalie Wood was a celebrated Hollywood actress. A former child star, she was nominated for three Oscars and won three Golden Globes during her career. She starred in classics like Miracle on 34th Street, Rebel Without A Cause, Gypsy, and West Side Story. Yet it wasn’t all rose scent and moonshine.
Natalie was born Natalja Nikolaevna Zakharenko in 1938, the daughter of Russian immigrants. Her father had violent alcoholic outbursts and her authoritarian mother quickly drove the child to become the family breadwinner. She is also said to have filled Natalie with a fear of dark water after a fortune-teller predicted she would die from drowning. During the filming of The Green Promise (1949) a bridge the young actress was running on collapsed. Natalie was left with a broken wrist (which led to a small protruding bone she always hid under bracelets) and a bigger fear of water than ever. It is even said the actress had such a phobia she was afraid to wash her hair and had nightmares about drowning.
However, reports of her anxiety are probably exaggerated. After all, she and her husband had bought a yacht where they spend most of their weekends and holidays on. Fellow sailors often saw her alone in Valiant, the yacht’s inflatable dinghy.
Robert Wagner
On her eighteenth birthday, Natalie had a date with Robert Wagner, an actor best known for his role as Jonathan Hart on the television series Hart to Hart. Wagner was eight years her senior, but a romance quickly developed. A year later, in 1957, the couple got married. It was a tumultuous and highly publicized marriage, ending in divorce in 1962.
After a string of relationships, Natalie tied the knot again in 1969. This time the actress married British producer Richard Gregson. The couple had a daughter, Natasha, but split up in 1971.
Natalie hadn’t forgotten Wagner, though. Three months after the divorce from her second husband was finalized, she remarried her first. The couple welcomed their daughter Courtney in 1974.
Wagner himself also had an older daughter, Katie, born during his earlier marriage to actress Marion Marshall.
November 27th, 1981
It was the weekend after Thanksgiving. Natalie and Wagner had invited some people on their yacht Splendour, but most declined due to the predicted bad weather. Only Christopher Walken accepted. The actor was working with Natalie on the science fiction film Brainstorm. According to captain and self-proclaimed family friend Dennis Davern, Natalie had fallen in love with Walken during shooting. Around the same time reports noted that she had jealous streaks over the relationship between Wagner and his Hart to Hart co-star Stefanie Powers. Whether any of these rumours were true or not, it’s safe to say there was tension between the couple that weekend.
Splendour set sail to Catalina Island around noon on the 27th of November and everyone on board was drinking more than their bid. Natalie and Wagner got into a heavy fight that evening, after which Davern took the actress ashore on the dinghy. They passed the night in the Pavilion Lodge Hotel and returned to Splendour the next morning. Oddly, the first time Davern was questioned about this he lied, stating that all four of them had slept on the yacht.
November 28th, 1981
In the afternoon, Natalie went ashore again, this time with Walken as her companion. They started drinking in Doug’s Harbor Reef, where Wagner and Davern later joined them. During dinner, Natalie supposedly threw a glass on the floor. Walken took the blame for this, saying that he threw a glass after making a toast and the actress simply followed suit. According to Davern, Natalie and Walken seemed flirty. Between 10 p.m. and 10:30 p.m., the group left, heavily intoxicated. The night manager of the restaurant even called Harbor Patrol to make sure they made it to the yacht safely.
From here on, the story gets… confusing, to say the least. There are multiple versions of what happened from the moment the party got back on board. Not in the least because Wagner kept changing the story. The actor first claimed he and Walken had started a political debate during dinner, which continued on the yacht. Natalie got bored and went to bed at around 10:45 p.m. In another account, Walken supposedly told the investigators that husband and wife got into an argument about Natalie being away from the children for long periods of time during filming. The spat died down quickly. In a more recent explanation from Captain Davern, the group resumed drinking on board, a fight started during which Wagner broke a bottle of wine and accused Walken of trying to sleep with his wife.
We can conclude that Robert Wagner was arguing or even fighting with someone else on the yacht. It’s also certainly Wagner who discovers (or pretends to discover) Natalie is missing. In some statements, the boat was then searched by the three men, who alarmed the coast guard after noticing the dinghy was gone too. In others, Wagner is not immediately concerned since his wife often took the Valiant out alone, and he only contacts the coast guard when she doesn’t reappear. According to Davern in current years, Wagner at first delayed calling for help and refused to turn on the floodlights or the engine because he didn’t want to attract bad publicity.
John Payne and his girlfriend Marilyn Wayne, sleeping in a nearby boat, reported hearing shouts around 11 p.m. that fateful evening. They claimed to hear a woman yelling “Help me! Someone please help me! I’m drowning!”, then (according to some accounts) a drunken man mockingly responding “Okay honey, we’ll get you.” The cries went on for about half an hour. There was a party going on on another boat or on shore, so the couple didn’t think much of it at the time.
The Discovery
In any case, the Coast Guard was not informed until 1:30 a.m. Possibly hours after the actress had disappeared. It took another six hours before Natalie Wood was found, floating about a mile away from the yacht. The dinghy was discovered washed up on the rocks. The ignition was off, the gear shift set to neutral and the oars locked. She probably never even started it.
Coroner Thomas Noguchi reported that her blood-alcohol level was at least 0.14. The actress had relatively fresh superficial bruises on her arms and lower legs, plus a cut on her cheek. These were initially attributed to her fall in the water.
Her death was ruled an accidental drowning. The coroner concluded that Natalie had been drinking, for some reason tried to board Valiant, slipped and drowned.
Foul Play?
There are lots of questions left unanswered. What was Natalie trying to do when she drowned? Did she want to go ashore? Why? Why did she not start the dinghy? Why was she dressed so lightly? How did she get in the water? Why did Wagner’s account change so often over time?
Christopher Walken has said next to nothing about the case and Dennis Davern is probably not the most reliable witness. It took him years to come forward with what he says to be the truth, releasing bits of information to the tabloids. His testimonies, however, ring most consistent with those of other witnesses and evidence.
What happened to Natalie Wood? There are two possibilities:
1. Natalie’s Death Was An Accident
Walken made one of his rare statements about the case in a 1997 Playboy interview: “Anybody there saw the logistics – of the boat, the night, where we were, that it was raining – and would know exactly what happened. […] She had gone to bed before us, and her room was at the back. A dinghy was bouncing against the side of the boat, and I think she went out to move it. There was a ski ramp that was partially in the water. It was slippery—I had walked on it myself. She had told me she couldn’t swim; in fact, they had to cut a swimming scene from Brainstorm. She was probably half asleep, and she was wearing a coat.”
It is possible something along those lines happened. Walken’s account of the evening is consistent with investigators’ initial findings.
2. Natalie Was Murdered
Since her death, accusing fingers have been pointed to Robert Wagner, now 90 years old. In 2011 the LA County Sheriff’s Department reopened the investigation after receiving additional information. Two years later, the cause of death was changed from “accidental drowning” to “drowning and other undetermined factors”. The new report casts questions on the nature of the bruises found on Natalie’s body. It’s likely they were there before she hit the water. In February 2018, a press conference was held stating that new witnesses had come forward with relevant information. Wagner was named as “a person of interest”. In January 2021, an inquiry into the drowning was opened after a petition. Legal action has been filed to obtain confidential records supposedly covering up the circumstances of the star’s death.
The Culprit?
By now, Captain Davern claims Wagner is responsible for the passing of his wife. In multiple interviews and the book Goodbye Natalie, Goodbye Splendour he states he heard Natalie and Wagner fight that fatal night. Around 11:30 p.m. Wagner returned looking “Tousled and sweating profusely as if he had been in a terrible fight, an ordeal of some kind.” He didn’t want to call for help or attempt to search for Natalie. When the body was found, Wagner told Davern and Walken to stick to the story: Natalie must have slipped and fallen in the water by accident. It’s worth noting Davern’s more recent versions of events don’t always seem consistent either.
Natalie’s younger sister Lana is also convinced her brother-in-law has something to hide. In interviews, she repeatedly accused him of murder. Lana often criticizes the original investigation and remains angry at Wagner for refusing to talk about it.
His children, however, fully support the actor. Courtney, who was seven when her mother died, regularly expressed her love and support for her father, “There are certain people in our lives that continue to drudge up all this speculation and stories every year for no other reason than to indulge themselves.” She also praises Wagner’s efforts to protect his children. Natasha, who was eleven at the time and remains close with her stepfather, wrote in her book More Than Love: An Intimate Portrait of My Mother, Natalie Wood, “My mother no longer has a voice of her own but I do and this is what I know – he loved Natalie ‘more than love’. No one in my world questioned my dad’s love for my mom or his utter despair at her loss.”
Robert Wagner has never been charged with anything in connection to the death of Natalie Wood. If he chose to give further statements to the police, it would be purely voluntary. In 2013 his attorney released the following statement, “Mister Wagner has fully cooperated over the last thirty years in the investigation of the accidental drowning of his wife in 1981. Mister Wagner has been interviewed on multiple occasions by the LA sheriff’s department and answered every single question asked of him by detectives during those interviews.”
Natalie, Forty Years Later
Although the cause of death is clear, the precise circumstances in which the star met her untimely end remain unknown. A wide variety of theories has been offered. Some plausible, others boarding on the insane. Her tragic death sadly overshadows her life and career. When thinking about Natalie Wood, everyone immediately recalls her mysterious drowning. By dying young and tragically, her talent and life were denied a proper legacy. As Natasha says in the documentary Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind, “There’s been so much speculation and focus on how she died that it’s overshadowed her life’s work and who she was as a person.”
