When you invite Christopher Walken onto your boat for a little trip around the bay, weird things are bound to happen. Oh, maybe Chris is a normal kind of guy, I don’t know. But he was there, on Robert Wagner’s boat, the night Natalie Wood was drowned.
I loved her in West Side Story, one of my all-time favorite movies. In fact, I still sing some of the songs around the house and stomp my feet around like I’m actually getting the choreography right. But that’s my problem.
Natalie Wood had plenty of problems on her own. We first saw her in Miracle on 34th Street when she was just eight years old. Her real name is Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko, by the way.
She grew up with family violence at the hands of an alcoholic father. Her mother, a wannabe ballet dancer, put the burden of an unrealized career on her beautiful daughter Natalie, causing psychological abuse as a child star.
As a result, Natalie had all sorts of paranoia and phobias. She had a bedroom of beautiful dolls she believed were alive and spoke to her. Then, there is the story of her being pimped at fifteen to Frank Sinatra. The stories go on and on about her early days, even being exploited into a sexual encounter as a teenager with the director of the movie, Nicholas Ray, who was 42. All to prove that she could play a “bad” girl in Rebel Without a Cause.
So who knows what mindset she was in before finally marrying Robert Wagner. They first married on December 28, 1957, in Scottsdale, Arizona. A few years later, they separated, and by April 27, 1962, they were divorced. Wagner and Wood married again, for a second time, in 1972. During both of their marriages, they experienced volatility.
But however it happened, they were out there, on a weekend boat trip to Santa Catalina Island on board Wagner’s yacht. A boat called Splendour. There were four people on board that night: Wagner, Wood, Walken, and the captain of the boat, Dennis Davern.
Natalie Wood would wind up dead in the water, her body found shoeless and wearing only a nightgown and red parka. It floated in a rocky cove near Santa Catalina Island off the coast of Los Angeles on November 29. She was 43.
The captain stated that he heard Wood and Wagner arguing fiercely, telling her to “Get the f**k off my boat.” Later, one source would give information that Christopher Walken said he heard the fight between Robert and Natalie. Walken also told that friend, not long after Natalie drowned, that Wagner pushed her.
The autopsy also showed that she had significant bruising on her head, thighs, and shins as if she’d put up a struggle, like trying to get back on a boat. The one injury on her head was enough to have made her unconscious. A little more, than perhaps, tripping over her own feet and falling into the water.
It’s all a great big mystery, surrounding a talented actress with a troubled life.
Robert Wagner is 91 today. His birthday this February 10.
Originally, Natalie Wood’s death was investigated as a potential homicide but then ruled an accident. Recently, her death was reclassified as “suspicious.”
And so it goes.
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We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect.
— Henry David Thoreau
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“My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.”
― Franz Kafka
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“No guilt is forgotten so long as the conscience still knows of it.”
― Stefan Zweig, Beware of Pity
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The mysterious death of Natalie Wood.
