In the awful aftermath of her drowning, a month or so later, Walken would acknowledge that Natalie “wasn’t much of a drinker.”
The perception that Natalie and Walken were romantically involved was so pervasive that when R.J. flew to Raleigh to visit Natalie once, “there was a little bit of consternation,” recalls McGiffert. “I remember someone in Natalie’s hair and makeup group darkly saying, ‘R.J. is coming this weekend.’ And then another time, Chris’s wife showed up with very little forewarning, and I think there was a lot of kind of dodging and weaving that was going on.” McGiffert believed that R.J. was not suspicious of Natalie and Walken while he was in Raleigh. “I don’t think he got that there was anything going on between them.”
R.J. would later tell a family employee he was irritated about Natalie’s location shooting in North Carolina because he had to film an episode of Hart to Hart in Hawaii that October while she was in Raleigh, leaving Natasha and Courtney without one parent at home for a few days, a violation of the Wagners’ marital understanding. R.J. felt Natalie was the one who should be home with the girls, not him.
McGiffert, who interacted with Natalie and Walken many times a day on and off the set, liked them both and had a “light relationship” with them, felt “there’s no question” the two were intimate. “It didn’t really take a hell of a lot to notice what was going on… you could see it. It wasn’t like you had to be stupid and be told this. And it wasn’t like they were lovey-dovey on the set or anything like that, but they just had a current about them, and an electricity.” McGiffert construed Natalie’s occasional wine consumption with Walken as a way for her to relax. “They weren’t drunk, but they were buzzed. Not to the point where it was impairing their work, but they were a little giddier than usual… she just looked to me like a woman who was opening up a little more.”
People who knew Natalie well, such as her hairdresser and friend of eighteen years, Sugar Bates, or her sister Lana, find it unimaginable that Natalie could have been having an affair with Walken. “I think she was probably having a flirtation, which is different than having an affair,” contends Lana. “I really don’t think that she would do that. There may have been those kind of boy-girl little attention games going on. A genuine affair, I don’t believe it for an instant. I would just never believe it of her. I really don’t believe she would do that. Ever, ever, ever, ever. She would not have risked her marriage.”
If she had, it would have been Natalie’s first known extramarital affair, something she did not condone, as she made clear by initiating a divorce from Richard Gregson and excommunicating him within hours of discovering his liaison with her secretary.
What Natalie unmistakably experienced was an emotional connection with Walken that filled a void in her life, stimulating her in a way that was powerfully evocative of Jimmy Dean’s effect on her during Rebel Without a Cause. McGiffert, who was around them throughout filming, sensed that Natalie was “transformed” by the relationship with Walken. “It was a dramatic, uplifting thing for her, you could tell that she was fulfilled, that she was refocused. And it was nice to see… I think she was blown away. This weird guy from New York, he said these goofy things, and put her in these goofy positions, and he’d show her up and play jokes on her.”
Natalie was in conflict in herself that fall, or selves. The serious actress part of her that was drawn to Kazan and Dean was excited by Walken and the chance to express herself artistically, while the star-driven “Natalie Wood” side of her was comfortable in the celebrity world she and R.J. symbolized. “They were the king and queen of the Hollywood parade,” as Fletcher observed, “and when you spend that much time in Hollywood—and I’m using that word ‘Hollywood’ on purpose—if you start out that young, you kind of believe what you read in the paper, that you are royal in some way: you know, ‘Hollywood royalty.’ And she was. She was a member of that old school… she and R.J. kind of are the way they were. Together they felt special.”
The true Natalie, Natalie the mother, was isolated and lost without Natasha and Courtney. “She called all the time,” recalls Peggy Griffin. “I’d go over there and have a bite to eat with R.J. and she was always on the phone. Constantly. With the kids.”
McGiffert, their on-set liaison during those charged last weeks on Brainstorm, had fond feelings for Natalie, and liked Walken. “She was the kind of person I would like to have for a friend. She had long periods of being lonely and had spent a lot of time figuring out what was important to her. And the things that were important to her were unexpected from someone of her magnitude: simple truths, affection and honesty. And she was in a business where all three of those things are in short supply.”
Screenwriter Stitzel, whose Brainstorm script had been brutalized by the chaotic production, considered Walken “the downfall” of the film, “just the spirit that he brought into it, it wasn’t an uplifting spirit. It was almost evil. Not that he was abrasive, he just seemed very aloof and indifferent.” Stitzel was especially offended by the last scene in the script, which he claims Walken instigated Natalie to perform while they were intoxicated. “When you have to get drunk to have to do a scene, something is really wrong. I don’t even know if Trumbull was there or not. It’s just pathetic as to where that film was originally going to go.”
Fletcher, who was not on set during that scene, heard the same thing as Stitzel. “I know they had a tough time that night… in her case, it would probably have been like two glasses of wine. She was so little, and she couldn’t handle it.”
By the first week in November, the star-crossed Brainstorm company returned to L.A. to finish the last month of shooting on the sound-stage at MGM.
Walken checked into a hotel and Natalie reunited with her family in the house on Canon, showing up at MGM as needed for her scenes, carrying out the mundane errands of motherhood she found so fulfilling, taking lessons to strengthen her voice for Anastasia, which would start rehearsals after Thanksgiving and open at the Ahmanson Theater in February. “To be live on stage absolutely terrified her,” recalls Stitzel, one of the many to whom Natalie mentioned her fear.
“We were all talking about what we might do to help her,” actor David Dukes, who was cast as Rasputin, would recall. “We felt we’d probably go with body mikes because she certainly wouldn’t have the voice for a theater like that.”
Her conversations with Lana then, and an interview she gave when she got back from North Carolina, suggest that Natalie was disenchanted with Brainstorm. She told Lana it was a “so-so” movie, and said to a reporter, “Today’s films are so technological that an actor becomes starved for roles that deal with human relationships. My friends seem more excited about my doing Anastasia than about Brainstorm… and to tell you the truth, I feel the same way.”
Child actress Tonya Crowe, who played Natalie’s daughter both in Cracker Factory and Eva Ryker, stopped to see her mid-November on the Brainstorm set. Crowe remembers Natalie as bubbling over about Anastasia, autographing, with typical warmth, what would be her last “Natalie Wood” glamour shot, “to my favorite screen daughter.” To Crowe, Natalie was not only the epitome of a star, she was the epitome of a mother. “All I know is that she took me under her wing in such a motherly way. I worked with Donna Mills as my mother on Knots Landing and Donna Mills loved having a child on the set, but it wasn’t anything like Natalie. Natalie adored being a mother. She had total respect for children—not just love, but respect.”
She posed for a portrait that month as the mystery woman claiming to be Anastasia, used in advertisements announcing the forthcoming play, a haunting preview of what might have been. It was a stunning photograph of Natalie as the putative Romanov duchess, in a plunging gown, wearing an ornate jeweled necklace, her hair upswept and her dark Russian eyes smoldering; the closest she would get to fulfilling her fantasy to honor Mud and Fahd’s reverence for the Russian royal family and her own buried identity as Natasha Gurdin.
Brainstorm continued on its troubled, anar
chic course through November. David McGiffert, who carried on as first assistant director in L.A., noticed that “things were a little more contentious” between Trumbull and the united force of Natalie and Walken once filming began on the MGM lot. “They were now aligned to what they were doing with the script, and obviously their relationship was playing into the relationship on the screen: the relationship on the screen was of a couple that was having trouble, and the offscreen relationship was of a couple that was having a great time.”
The charged friendship between Walken and Natalie was still evident after she was back home with R.J. “The dynamics that went into that were funny, they were hazy, they would change a lot,” appraised McGiffert. “Lots of mood swings about what was going on.” McGiffert noticed Natalie seemed to open up around Walken in a way that was similar to what Redford described during the times they acted together when she dropped the “Natalie Wood” movie star persona. As McGiffert remembers, “She was really alive. She had a beautiful laugh, and a beautiful way of just letting go, and she’d just get all goofy and fall over things. It was fun to watch, because she was usually pretty controlled, and she’d just get giddy and it was infectious. And it would make Chris want to do more to make her laugh, and he was good at that.”
Faye Nuell stopped by the set at MGM to see Natalie, since Nuell was working on the lot. “She was clearly infatuated with Christopher,” in the observation of Nuell, who felt Natalie “basically told me, without saying the words, they were having an affair.”
If Natalie was romantically involved with Walken, she did not share it that November with her best friend, Peggy Griffin, who “would be greatly surprised” if it were true. What is clear, and becomes significant, is that there was a perception she was intimate with Walken, at least among the people involved with Brainstorm, to the point that McGiffert, the first assistant director, was certain R.J. was aware of it by Thanksgiving, pointing out, “He’s not stupid.”
Natalie alluded to colleagues on the set that R.J.’s drinking was bothering her, just as she had to Sugar Bates during the trying Eva Ryker shoot exactly two years before, when Natalie was preoccupied with premonitions she would drown in dark water. Outwardly, Natalie and R.J. appeared “just, oh, madly in love” to their mutual close friend Griffin that pre-Thanksgiving, who described them as “a happy couple; very playful, very respectful, very supportive. A team at all times, on every level.”
Faye Nuell stopped by Natalie’s Brainstorm set the fortnight before Thanksgiving for what would be their last conversation. Nuell and Natalie stood in a doorway in one of the buildings on the MGM lot, both suddenly experiencing a “total flashback” to when they met in 1955 on Rebel Without a Cause. They were struck by how many of their friends from the movie had died early—Jimmy Dean, Sal Mineo, Nick Adams. “It was like, ‘Oh my God, we’re still here!’”
That same week, in what would be a cruel irony, actor William Holden, the longtime companion of Stefanie Powers, R.J.’s costar on Hart to Hart, was found dead in his bedroom after tripping and gashing his head while under the influence of alcohol. R.J. comforted Powers over the needless loss of her great love, as she would do for him less than two weeks later, under circumstances that were also engendered by the effects of excessive alcohol, the true demon surrounding Natalie from earliest childhood in a household haunted by Fahd’s vodka-inflamed rage.
On Thanksgiving morning, Natalie and her friend Griffin had a long phone conversation about their weekend plans. Brainstorm was winding down, and Natalie was excited about starting rehearsals on Monday for Anastasia. “Everything about this whole sad time to me was so ironic,” observes Griffin. “For years, my tradition was that I had Thanksgiving with my parents, and then in the early evening, about 6:00, I’d go over to Natalie and R.J.’s and have dessert and coffee. And this particular year I had a friend in the hospital, and my whole Thanksgiving Day got kind of turned around.”
Griffin told Natalie she couldn’t make it for dessert that night, and they discussed Natalie and R.J.’s plans to spend Friday through Sunday off Catalina, on the Splendour. The Wagners planned to take Natalie’s close friend, realtor Delphine Mann. Griffin was invited, but declined. “I never went on the boat in the winter. It’s very confining. You don’t have the freedom of doing all those things you do in the summer.”
She and Natalie said their goodbyes, and set a date to see a movie together that Sunday night after Natalie got back from Catalina. “I still remember the movie we were going to see,” Griffin recalls sadly. “Absence of Malice, with Paul Newman. And to this day, I’ve never seen the movie. I just couldn’t see it.”
That night, a few close friends and family dropped in and out of the Wagners’ house for their traditional Thanksgiving buffet. Mud was there, Lana and her daughter, Mart Crowley, Delphine Mann, R.J.’s mother, and for a time Walken, whose wife was on the East Coast. Natalie had invited Walken on the boat for the weekend, allegedly to demonstrate to a suspicious R.J. that they were not having an affair, though it was typical of the socially gregarious Wagners to bring costars on the Splendour as their guests.
More typically, the boat was a family affair, with Natasha or Courtney inviting chums along to swim and Jet-Ski with R.J., while Natalie sat in the galley or in the wheelhouse reading scripts or the latest bestseller. She never swam, never Jet-Skied, and would not participate in anything water-related. If the Splendour was moored, Natalie might take the girls or a guest to shore in the Valiant, the Wagners’ motorized dinghy, but she would never get in the dinghy alone at night.
Later that Thanksgiving evening, she asked Crowley if he wanted to join her and R.J. on the Splendour with Walken and Delphine Mann. Crowley had a conflict, and at the last minute, Delphine Mann canceled. “She had some things coming up that weekend,” explains Griffin, “and so she changed her plans.” Mann would later agonize over her eleventh-hour decision not to go to Catalina with Natalie and R.J. and Walken. As Griffin would observe wistfully, “You think, ‘Well maybe, if someone else was there, it might change just anything …”
Lana, who was banned from the Splendour, along with Mud, felt Natalie “seemed odd” that Thanksgiving night, the last time she saw her sister alive. “Like something was bothering her. Nothing specific, just lots of little bitty things.”
What would forever haunt Lana was Natasha’s hysterical reaction to her mother’s plans to leave for Catalina in the morning. Natasha begged Natalie to stay home, not to go on the boat that weekend.
Normally, Natalie would indulge her daughters anything. But in this case, she said no to Natasha. She didn’t want Natasha to grow up with the kind of deep-seated fears Mud had instilled in her.
THE TRAGIC, ANOMALOUS EVENTS OF NATALIE’S sad, last, lost weekend off Catalina Island, leading to her greatest fear realized—drowning in deep, dark water—have been speculated about and exploited throughout the twenty years since she died, threatening to eclipse the memory of her poignant performances, and the grace with which she lived her life, which is how she should be remembered.
Because the circumstances surrounding Natalie’s drowning have been the subject of such speculation, this examination of her last hours is offered to help clarify, at least, what is known and what has been offered in explanation by the participants, some of it for the first time, though the full details of that night may be lost in an alcoholic haze and remain a mystery.
Of the four people on the Splendour that weekend—Natalie, R.J., Christopher Walken, and the Wagners’ private captain, Dennis Davern—only Davern has talked publicly at length about what he claimed happened, and his stories have trickled out through the years in tabloids, for remuneration; in a British documentary and in Vanity Fair. His public accounts have stopped short of the climactic last moments when Natalie went off the boat, which he says he knows and has held back under pressure, hoping at some point to disclose for profit in a book, or as his coauthor put it, “his day to reveal the truth.” Natalie cannot give witness, and R.J. and
Walken have each maintained silence other than through two hazy statements given by each to authorities, a brief, confusing interview by Walken, and in R.J.’s case, a four-paragraph account offered by him in conflict with some of the facts, followed by a contradictory explanation offered through a friend.
Consequently, Natalie’s last weekend can only be patched together from bewilderingly vague, confusing, contradictory statements given by the principals to L.A. Sheriff’s investigators, supplemented by the recorded statements and twenty-year-old memories of witnesses, or from Davern’s subsequent accounts.
By any interpretation, using all of the versions available, the last thirty-six hours of Natalie’s too-short life consisted of an almost surreal, bizarre, alcoholically charged chain of circumstances and behavior unlike hers or R.J.’s, building, like grand opera, to a tragic climax, the details of which may remain as murky as the dark seawater she had a premonition would take her life.
Natalie, R.J., Walken, and Davern, the skipper R.J. brought to California to keep in his employ when he bought the Splendour in 1975, set sail for Catalina Island from Marina Del Rey before noon the Friday after Thanksgiving, the beginning of a cold, gray November weekend so unpleasant Davern suggested they go a different time. Natalie “was out for a wonderful weekend, to entertain her guest,” Davern would recall to a friend, and Catalina was the Wagners’ sentimental favorite, because of their romantic first honeymoon in 1958, tucked aboard My Other Lady.
Davern, a slight, bearded, lanky New Jersey native of thirty-three, “worshipped” Natalie and R.J., friends recalled, thrilled to be included in his celebrity bosses’ family activities during weekend getaways on the Splendour, “helping to raise” Courtney and Natasha. As his childhood friend and coauthor Margaret Rulli would rhapsodize, “It was just like an unheard of Hollywood lifestyle. They really had the marriage. Robert Wagner loved Natalie Wood, his love for her took his breath away.”
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