In the past, when Natalie was reading or sunbathing on the aft deck during the day, she had more than once been irritated by the sound of the dinghy banging against the side, and gone to open the door to the swim-step below. The rope that secured the dinghy was tied to a brass ring beside the step, and after untying the knot, she had to pull the rope tight, then retie it.
If, as RJ believed, Natalie heard the dinghy banging against the side of the stateroom that night, she knew it would prevent her from sleeping. When it occasionally woke them both at night, RJ always got up to tighten the rope; and normally, of course, Natalie would never have gone out to the swim-step and faced the dark ocean alone. But now she was emotionally disturbed and mentally dulled by a combination of Darvon and too much wine. Although she could have returned to the saloon, and asked RJ or Davern to secure the dinghy, it seems improbable. She knew they were both drunk, the situation with Walken had created “a terrible fight” with her husband the night before, and only an hour or two earlier she had walked out when they got into a heated argument.
Even during the day you had to be careful when securing the dinghy from the teakwood swim-step, a feature of Splendour that Guy McElwaine always found “curious.” Teakwood is exceptionally durable, and much used in shipbuilding because its essential oil resists the action of water; but when an ocean swell kept washing over the swim step, as it did that night, it always became slippery. The autopsy reported a heavy bruise on Natalie’s right arm, a lesser one on her left wrist, as well as various bruises on both legs, her left knee and right ankle, and an abrasion on her left cheek. They first led Noguchi to conclude that “Natalie Wood, possibly attempting to board the dinghy, had fallen into the ocean, striking her face,” and because of the absence of head wounds, “she had been conscious while in the water.”
From fingernail scratches on one side of the dinghy, Noguchi also concluded that when Natalie tried to climb into it, the weight of the parka pulled her down. (She weighed around ninety-eight pounds at the time, and the parka, when waterlogged, weighed forty. Ironically, after she drowned, it kept her afloat.) But the conclusion was premature, and by announcing at his press conference that Natalie intended to go off in the dinghy by herself, Noguchi caused several journalists to wonder (hopefully) if she had been in physical danger; and the wheel of the Hollywood rumor mill began spinning overnight.
The next day, Noguchi’s belief that “every death is a homicide, unless proved otherwise,” decided him to instruct Paul Miller to search Splendour and the dinghy for signs of violence or struggle. Although Miller reported that “there weren’t any signs of a struggle in the yacht or the dinghy,” he would later disagree with RJ’s theory that Natalie had heard the dinghy banging against the side of Splendour. It was made of rubber, he said, and would have created almost no sound at all. But he was evidently unaware that the dinghy had an outboard motor, and the impact of metal on wood would have been far from silent; just as Noguchi was unaware, when he first believed that Natalie had tried to leave the boat, that to board it from the swim step was notoriously dangerous in rough weather, and even when the ocean was calm, one person usually held the rope close to the step while the other climbed in.
On December 12, the police concluded that Natalie’s death was accidental, and the case was officially closed. But media speculation continued, and the sleaze mongers found it “mysterious” that in the hours following Natalie’s death, RJ first denied having an argument with Walken, then admitted it, and that he alternately thought she’d gone off in the dinghy by herself, then felt sure she hadn’t. They also found it “mysterious” that Walken first denied, then admitted having an argument with RJ, and that the two men didn’t always agree on the exact timing of events.
All this, of course, fails to take the Hellman syndrome into account, as well as the natural desire of both men to protect their own and Natalie’s privacy. It would only have been “mysterious” if a stunned, drunken RJ had managed to act immediately and precisely when he discovered that Natalie was missing, or if RJ and Walken, when questioned by the police, had immediately and precisely agreed on what happened, and when, during that disoriented alcoholic night.
TWO INCIDENTAL questions remain. Paul Miller reported to Noguchi that if Natalie fell off the swim step, tried to climb into the dinghy, then managed to hang on to it, the wind would have blown both of them toward the mainland instead of Blue Cavern Point. According to RJ, equally familiar with local winds and tides, the current as well as the wind flowed toward the mainland. But as Natalie noted in her daybook for November 28, the undertow was very strong, and an undertow always flows in the opposite direction to the surface current. There was also a second, milder surface current that flowed closer offshore from Isthmus Cove, ran south toward Blue Cavern, and like the undertow would have carried Natalie and the dinghy further along the coast. According to the autopsy, she could have clung to the dinghy for at most an hour before hypothermia set in; then body and dinghy would have continued to drift with the offshore current.
Among the many pieces of trivial or publicity-seeking “evidence” in the gossip columns and police reports, one gained some attention at the time. John Payne (not the actor) and his fiancee, Marilyn Wayne, whose boat was moored approximately eighty feet from Splendour, claimed to have heard a drowning woman’s cries for help that night, followed by “drunken male voices” calling from another nearby boat, “Don’t worry, we’re coming to get you.” But neither RJ nor Walken recalled hearing any voices from another boat, and RJ said later that he was “not convinced the couple heard anything. Although we’d been drinking, we’d certainly have heard a cry for help, if it came from nearby, because water’s a great conduit for sound.”
On December 3, Wayne’s story appeared in the Los Angeles Times, but the Sheriff’s Department was unconvinced, and ignored it.
THIS LONELINESS WON’T LEAVE ME ALONE. “This” implies that Natalie’s loneliness was not a sudden, momentary feeling. And it certainly started no later than the age of fourteen, when she realized that Nick and Maria’s love was not the parental love celebrated in the movies she made, but dependent on the money she earned. Two years later, it was still a familiar spirit when she worked the room at parties, “looking for love.” Much later, at another party, Richard Gregson glimpsed her looking “so beautiful and so alone,” and her first reaction to Daisy Clover was that “at every important moment in her life, she’s alone.”
But if she still felt alone on November 29, 1981, perhaps time as the great healer is overrated; and once Natalie became aware of that hole in her world, she could still fall into it even when genuinely loved and loving.
Micky Ziffren: If Natalie had lived, I think the marriage would have survived.
“She’s gone! She’s gone!” RJ’s voice on the phone, “distraught and hysterical,” woke Mart Crowley shortly before seven a.m. on November 30. “The police are taking Chris and me by helicopter to Santa Monica Airport. Please pick us up.”
When the limousine that Mart ordered brought him to the airport, Duane Rasure had already interviewed RJ and Walken, and the helicopter had left. “I looked around, and saw two men standing, hunched, their backs to each other, alone on the airfield. When the limo drove over, they got in without a word. RJ, who was fighting back tears, wanted to stop at the house of psychiatrists Dr. Malin and his wife, to ask how to break the news to Natasha and Courtney. Walken was silent while we waited.”
A crowd of “reporters, photographers and gawkers” waited outside 603 North Canon, and the living room was already full of friends, including Roddy McDowall, Josh Donen, Linda Foreman, Guy McElwaine and Tom Mankiewicz, who remembered that “it was as if the world was in color, but RJ was in black and white.” Liz Applegate, whom RJ had phoned and asked to stay at the house, had already received a hysterical phone call from Georgiane Walken, “who didn’t know that her husband was on the boat.” RJ’s doctor, Paul Rudnick, was waiting with an offer of sedation, but he refused it, “wan
ting to be there for the kids.”
He went straight upstairs to the nursery, and shortly afterward Mart heard “a scream from Natasha. ‘It’s not fair! It’s not fair!’ ” Then RJ came downstairs again and asked Mart to go to the Pierce Brothers mortuary in Westwood, where Natalie’s body had been taken after the autopsy, and “arrange for Natalie to be fixed up before he let her daughters see her.” If he saw her body there, RJ explained, he knew he’d break down. Then he went upstairs again.
As Howard Jeffrey had handled the funeral arrangements for Norma Crane at Westwood Memorial Park, and knew the supervisor, Mart asked him to help. They went to the mortuary together, and Bill Pierce took them to see Natalie’s body, “naked under a sheet. He folded back the sheet, and she looked terrible—hair matted—she’d been in salt water all night—bruises and scratches on various parts of her body, an abrasion on her cheek.” Then Mart called Sydney Guilaroff: “I asked him to fix Natalie’s hair, and he promised to come right over. As BJ [Bob Jiras] was in New York, I called RJ’s makeup man, Frank Westmore, to fix her face, but he begged off. ‘I just couldn’t,’ he said. So I tried Eddie Butterworth, who did Natalie’s makeup for the studio scenes on Brainstorm, and he agreed. Then Howard and I hurried back to Canon Drive to choose a long dress, shoes, stockings and so on, and we got her dressed at the mortuary just before Guilaroff arrived.”
Immaculate as ever in a dark suit, white tie and white shirt, Guilaroff inspected Natalie’s hair and said it would take two hours to fix. The supreme professional had come prepared, and brought along a fall he’d created for Ava Gardner, whose hair was almost exactly the same color. He shampooed Natalie’s hair by hand, blow-dried it, then began very carefully to comb the front over Gardner’s fall.
Meanwhile, Eddie Butterworth worked on Natalie’s face, and at first his hand shook so much that he asked Mart: “Is it okay if I rest it on her cheek?” Mart nodded, then held Natalie’s hand until Guilaroff and Butterworth finished. After Guilaroff stepped back to check the effect of Gardner’s fall, he said quietly: “You’d never know.”
And to Mart and Howard, “She looked beautiful. Like Natalie.”
Until December 2, the day of the funeral, RJ spent most of the time in bed, numb with shock and grief. His lawyer, Paul Ziffren, made him promise not to talk to the press, but then issued his own surprisingly inaccurate and unhelpful attempt at damage control: “Since Mrs. Wagner often took the dinghy out alone, Mr. Wagner was not immediately concerned. However, when she failed to return after ten or fifteen minutes, Mr. Wagner took his small cruiser and went to look for her.”
Meanwhile, telegrams of condolence arrived from President Reagan, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau of Canada, Queen Elizabeth of England, Prince Philip and Princess Margaret; and friends gathered every day in the living room. “I’m so sorry about this,” Liz Applegate told Chris Walken when he came by on December 1 and sat alone at the bar. “So am I,” he replied. “So why don’t you shut up about it?”
In London, Hugo Gregson had heard the news on the radio and immediately informed his father. Richard Gregson caught the next available plane to Los Angeles, arrived there on the morning of December 1 and went straight to Canon Drive: “After I had a talk with Natasha, I went upstairs to see RJ in his bedroom. He was in tears, and very concerned about my plans for Natasha. I told him that I’d already explained to her that I didn’t want to break up the family, and she agreed. RJ was relieved and grateful.”
Soon afterward, Natasha said that she wanted to see her mother before the body was transferred to a closed coffin. RJ, who was initially doubtful about this, called Drs. Lindon and Malin. They both approved, and he arranged for his driver to take Richard, Natasha, Courtney and Liz Applegate to the mortuary. But he didn’t feel capable of going with them.
When they arrived, Natasha hesitated, as if unsure whether she could go through with it. “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” Liz told her, and Natasha walked slowly across the room to the open casket. Mart and Howard were already there, and Mart remembered that Natasha stared at Ava Gardner’s fall. “That’s not Mummy’s hair,” she said, then told her father that she’d written Natalie a letter and wanted to put it in her hand. As rigor mortis had made the hand difficult to lift, Richard helped her. Courtney, too young to understand that her mother was dead, decided that she must give her something as well, and the driver offered his handkerchief. She lifted the blanket, and Natasha recalled that “she threw it in sort of haphazardly.” Then, according to Richard: “Natasha told me very sweetly that she wanted to be alone with her mother. So the rest of us moved to the waiting room and I stayed just inside the doorway. I could hear Natasha talking very quietly to her mother, although not what she said. Then Natasha looked up and closed the door. I glanced back at the waiting room and for a surrealist moment saw Courtney playing hopscotch on the square tiles of the floor.”
After a few minutes, Natasha opened the door and said she was ready to leave. On the way back to North Canon, “She was very calm and behaved as if she’d done what had to be done and what she wanted to do.” For Gregson it remained “one of the most extraordinary episodes of my life,” and he would never forget how “amazingly beautiful” Natalie looked, or how she’d once told him that “she always believed she wouldn’t make old bones.”
During the late evening of December 1, RJ came downstairs and joined Mart Crowley, Liz, Josh Donen and Arnold Stiefel in the living room. When the doorbell rang, Willie Mae went to answer it, and a chauffeur announced that Miss Taylor would like to see Mr. Wagner. Miss Taylor, who was appearing in The Little Foxes at the Ahmanson Theater, had changed into postperformance clothes but still wore stage makeup. “Oh baby, baby,” she said to RJ. “What happened to us, baby?”
THAT SAME EVENING, Rock Hudson phoned Donfeld. He had always been very fond of Natalie, and although just out of the hospital after heart bypass surgery and still very weak, he was determined to attend the funeral service the next day. “Hang close to me at the cemetery,” he said. Then, sounding on the verge of tears: “I have no understanding of why really good people have to die so horribly.”
Also that evening, the famously shy and private eighty-two-year-old Fred Astaire agreed to talk about Natalie in the presence of reporters and TV cameras. Standing in the driveway of his home, he spoke quietly and simply about Natalie as a woman, an actress and “the perfect balm” for her friends. “I wanted to keep it short,” he told Donfeld later, “but once I got there and began talking about Natalie, it was difficult to stop.”
BOTH RJ and Gregson agreed that the funeral ceremony at Westwood Memorial Park should be brief, with only family and friends in attendance; and as they also agreed on “no religious music,” Howard Jeffrey suggested balalaika music instead. Howard was one of the pallbearers, alongside Mart Crowley, Josh and Peter Donen, John Foreman, Bob Lang (the Wagners’ handyman-carpenter at Canon Drive), Guy McElwaine, Tom Mankiewicz and Paul Ziffren. The honorary pallbearers included Fred Astaire, Eddie Butterworth, Sydney Guilaroff, Rock Hudson, John Irvin, Elia Kazan, Dr. John Lindon, Arthur Loew, David Niven, Laurence Olivier, Gregory Peck and Frank Sinatra.
After Father Stephen Fitzgerald of the Russian Orthodox Church gave the blessing, two friends made brief farewell speeches. Hope Lange: “Natalie, you put us to a very severe test today. It’s difficult to feel joy and laughter when you’re not here to share it.” Roddy McDowall: “Natalie found a way to put life in her heart and heart into her life.”
By then Natasha was in tears, but Courtney was still unable to come to terms with the situation. “She stood there, her face almost blank,” Richard Gregson recalled, “swinging one leg.” Meanwhile, RJ approached the pall of white gardenias laid over the coffin, picked up a handful, and offered a gardenia each to Natasha, Courtney and Kate. Then he bent over the coffin and kissed it, and the ceremony was over.
Although the news of Natalie’s death had induced one of Mud’s longest convulsions, she recovered her sense of drama for the
funeral. “If you’d been on the boat,” she said accusingly to Mart Crowley, “my daughter would still be alive.” But during the wake at 603 North Canon, RJ could barely control his grief. Arnold Schulman remembered him as “totally devastated, managing to play the perfect host for a while, then unable to keep up the front any longer.”
The first time RJ lost Natalie, he had also been “totally devastated,” but within a year it had occurred to him (and to her) that they might find each other again. Now there was no second chance, and the thought sent him back to bed, where he stayed for three days without shaving or showering.
DURING THE SECOND DAY that RJ remained in his room, he agreed to a final interview with Duane Rasure. Still totally distraught, he could only repeat that his first reaction, when he discovered both Natalie and the dinghy missing, was to decide that she must have gone ashore, because she often took Valiant out by herself. He was still too dazed to remember that Natalie only took the dinghy out by herself in daylight, usually to fetch groceries from the island store; but as the pain and confusion grew less acute, “He tried over and over again to make sense of what happened, and how Natalie fell in the water,” according to Mart Crowley. “He kept asking if there was any way he could have prevented it, and ‘What about Chris?’ ”
When he finally decided that Natalie must have tried to secure the dinghy to starboard, he sounded out Doug Bombard, whose boat also had a dinghy attached. “I agreed that it was definitely the most likely supposition,” Bombard told me. “Because from what I knew about Natalie, there was no way she’d have taken the dinghy out by herself at night.”
Natalie Wood Page 35