More Than Love: An Intimate Portrait of My Mother, Natalie Wood

by Natasha Gregson Wagner

  I call our family publicist Alan Nierob.

  “Oh, this is just a bunch of total bullshit,” Alan tells me. “Don’t worry, Natasha.”

  “But, Alan, is he going to be arrested?”

  “Are you crazy? Absolutely not,” Alan says in his no-nonsense way. “This is all a media frenzy because it’s the thirty-year anniversary of your mother’s death.”

  He’s going to find out exactly why the case has been reopened.

  I breathe. Okay, I’ve been through this before. Ever since my mother’s death, I have learned to block out the fake headlines in the trash magazines, the salacious sound bites of an upcoming “new development” just before a commercial break.

  I decide to take a shower to steady my nerves before I call my dad.

  The soothing warm water hits me but I am not soothed. I am outraged.

  How dare she?

  Why has my aunt decided on this moment to suddenly make her accusations? In 1984, she published a book about my mother. Around the same time, Lana did a TV interview where she was asked if she thought there was anything mysterious about my mother’s death. Lana replied, “Absolutely not!” Why didn’t she accuse my dad then? Why did she wait more than twenty-five years to “speak her truth”?

  Lana is seemingly angry at my dad for refusing to send her money. And now she has created a scandalous story and given it to TMZ.

  I will call Liz and Katie when I get out of the shower. I will get Lana’s number and I will call her and let her know that this time she has gone too far.

  I have a plan. I feel better. I hold Barry’s computer in my hands and it tumbles down the stairs.

  He starts to yell and then thinks better of it. He realizes that I am rattled. More so than I am letting on.

  I am seething. My phone rings.

  I hear Courtney’s voice on the other end.

  “Natasha, what the hell is going on?”

  I have not spoken to my sister in a couple of months, not since she left her most recent rehab in Pasadena. She is angry at me for not speaking to her, and I’m resigned to the fact that I cannot help her. Yet in this moment she calls me anyway. The news has broken through her haze.

  “Everything is okay. It’s just the press and Lana making a circus out of Mommie’s thirty-year anniversary.”

  “Is Daddy okay?”

  “I think he’s fine. Don’t worry. Are you okay, Court?”

  “Yes, I’m okay. I love you, sweets.”

  “I love you too. I promise I’ll keep you posted.”

  I call my dad.

  “Daddy, are you okay?”

  “Hi, Natooshie. Jesus, I’m so sorry you have to go through this.”

  My dad, thinking about me instead of himself.

  “I’m so sorry you have to relive that night again,” he says. “You know none of us heard her.…”

  “I know, Daddy,” I say. “Of course. I know.”

  I’m worried about him. He is eighty-one. I am worried he will have a heart attack or a stroke from the stress.

  I start to cry.

  “Daddy, I love you so much. Don’t worry about me. I’m worried about you.”

  We comfort each other. We will wait for the storm to pass.

  But the accusations come thick and fast. The former deckhand on our boat the Splendour, Dennis Davern, appears on national TV. Dennis was the only other person on the boat that night along with my dad and Christopher Walken. Dennis now says he lied to investigators when he gave his statement at the time of my mother’s death. That he wants to tell his “real story.”

  Dennis tells the interviewer that he was part of an attempt to cover up Natalie Wood’s murder, orchestrated by Robert Wagner. He suggests that my dad deliberately failed to help my mom when she was drowning, and this is why she died.

  How can Dennis say these things?

  I remember Dennis from my childhood, being on the boat and at our house. He was kind and helpful. I thought he appreciated my family and enjoyed being around us. When my parents first met him in the mid-1970s, he had been down on his luck. He was working in Florida for the Splendour’s previous owner, and had brought the boat from there to Long Beach because its former owner wanted to sell it. My dad felt sorry for Dennis, who was about to be out of a job, and so he kept him on as the boat’s deckhand. In those days, if Dennis didn’t have enough money for child support or alimony, as happened often, my mom and dad helped him out.

  Dennis must have fallen on hard times again because now he has decided to use the fact that he was on the boat the night my mom died to sell a book about “the truth about Natalie Wood,” cowritten with his childhood friend, a woman named Marti Rulli. In the book and on TV, Dennis has completely changed his statement from the one he told original investigators in 1981. Instead, he claims that the fight between my parents culminated in my dad yelling at my mom to “get off the boat.”

  He says he was afraid of my dad after my mother died, and that my father was holding him hostage at our house. That’s why he didn’t tell the police at the time. I was living in that same house then and I think I would have noticed if Dennis was being held in my home against his will. More importantly, I would have noticed if my dad was the kind of man to hold another man against his will in the first place! I have known Robert Wagner since before I was two years old. Abusive men leave traces as they move through their lives. Where is the history of my dad’s abuse? There is none. Why would my dad suddenly become secretly abusive and threatening toward his wife and others in 1981, at age fifty-one?

  My dad was kind to Dennis. He helped him. After he donated the Splendour to the Sea Scouts, he couldn’t give Dennis back his job on the boat, and so instead, he got Dennis a job as an extra in television and movies and a union card so he could find work more easily. But Dennis had a tough time making a go of it and eventually moved to Florida. We lost touch.

  Now, nearly twenty years later, Dennis is using the thirtieth anniversary of my mom’s death to parade this story.

  We soon learn why the investigation may have been reopened. An online petition spearheaded by Dennis’s cowriter on his book, Marti Rulli, has demanded that the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department look at the case again. The petition draws eight hundred signatures. Marti also presents witness reports that she has gathered, primarily from Dennis. My mother has been dead for thirty years and the investigation into her death is reopened. My family is thrown back into the most traumatic time in our lives.

  These people claim to care about my mother. They say they want “justice for Natalie.” But Dennis was on the boat the night my mom died. If he cared about my mom as much as he claims, why didn’t he try to save her? My parents’ boat wasn’t that big. If my dad could hear my mom’s cries and ignored them, wouldn’t this mean Dennis was doing the same?

  Another witness comes forward, Marilyn Wayne. She claims she was on her boat, the Capricorn, when she heard a woman calling for help the night of Natalie Wood’s death. Like everyone else, Marilyn seems to have changed her story. On December 3, 1981, Marilyn Wayne told the Los Angeles Times that she heard a woman crying for help that night and indicated that her boat was approximately three hundred feet away from the Splendour. In 2011, she declared in an official signed statement to the police that her boat was fifty feet away. Somehow, over the course of thirty years, her boat miraculously moved 250 feet closer to the one belonging to my parents.

  Our publicist advises our family not to comment, not to give any credence to the accusations and allegations. He puts out a statement saying that our family welcomes the investigation of Natalie Wood’s death if the information comes from “a credible source or sources other than those simply trying to profit from the 30-year anniversary of her tragic death.”

  Lana’s and Dennis’s accusations ignite a media frenzy. Thirty years after my mom’s death I am back at the grocery checkout averting my eyes from headlines claiming that she was murdered by my dad in a jealous rage, or that she was supposedly sl
eeping with Christopher Walken, or that her cries for help were ignored.

  The press needs to interview someone and Lana is more than willing. My aunt tells reporters that her sister hated water. That a fortune-teller told my grandmother her daughter would die by dark water, that she was afraid of it, that she wouldn’t even go into her own swimming pool at home. But my mother loved the water! She was always drawn to water, whether swimming pools or the ocean. She fell in love with boating at eighteen when she and R.J. were first dating, and even after they divorced she went boating on the weekends with her friends and spent a year living on the beach. When she remarried R.J. in 1972, they held the ceremony aboard a yacht at sea. Our family albums are filled with pictures of my mom in pools, in lakes, on beaches, and on boats. My mom did have an aversion to immersing herself in water that was dark enough to be opaque, because she was not a strong swimmer and didn’t like being in the ocean out of her depth.

  In the wake of the new investigation, Duane Rasure, the sheriff assigned to Mom’s case in 1981, goes on CBS News to defend his original findings. He confirms that if there had been any evidence that my dad was involved in any foul play, he would have arrested him personally. That my mother’s drowning was an accident. He also reminds people that Dennis Davern has a strong motive for stirring up the story again.

  “I think Dennis Davern is exaggerating this whole incident to sell his book.”

  Hardly anyone else seems to notice that the only accusations against my dad have been drummed up by Dennis, Lana, Marti, and others who appear to benefit financially from making my dad look bad.

  In early 2012, it is reported that the reopened investigation has uncovered no new evidence. But the sheriff’s department presses on. Around this same time, my dad is identified as a “person of interest” in the case. As our lawyers quickly explain to me, anyone within the vicinity of the boat that day would be a person of interest, including Dennis and Chris Walken. “Person of interest” doesn’t mean someone is a suspect, it simply means they were there. The sheriff’s department asks my dad to come in for questioning. He refuses, making it clear that he has said everything he has to say. Chris Walken also refuses, for the same reason.

  Because the case has been reopened, the Los Angeles County chief coroner is obliged to look at my mother’s death certificate again. He must also apply newer regulations within the coroner’s office that weren’t in effect when my mother died. Under these new standards, he must alter the wording on the death certificate, changing the cause of her death from “accidental drowning” to “drowning and other undetermined factors.”

  In a document, the coroner also states that the circumstances of exactly how Natalie Wood ended up in the water “could not be clearly established.” In January 2013, the same coroner’s office issues another statement explaining that my mother may have sustained some of the bruises on her body before she got into the water but that it could not be definitively determined. According to one forensic pathologist, she would have been particularly susceptible to bruising because of a medication she was taking.

  For the first time in my life, I examine closely the details of that weekend. I turn them around in my mind. I reexamine them. I talk to my therapist, my dad, Liz, Katie, and my mom’s friends. I discover that although decades have passed and the investigation has been reopened, there is no new evidence and my understanding of events remains the same.

  After my one last hug with my mom in her soft angora sweater, she drove with my dad and Chris Walken to the boat. That first night, my dad was not able to secure a mooring inside the harbor, and so he had to drop anchor outside the breakwater. The boat was rocking up and down and my mom was getting seasick, so she decided to go ashore to Catalina Island to stay in a hotel for the night. Dennis, our deckhand, went with her. (This is where she had called me at my friend Tracey’s house to see if I was okay.)

  The next morning, she came back to the boat, and my dad set off on course for the Isthmus, the strip of land connecting the two parts of Catalina Island. Here, they tied up. At this point, my dad took a nap because he was tired from the rough night before. When he woke up, Natalie and Chris had taken the dinghy and gone ashore. My dad called for a shore boat—a local vessel that you can radio to come and pick you up—so he could join my mom and Chris at a local bar. The three of them had dinner together, drank some wine, and then came back to the boat and opened another bottle of wine. My mom and Chris kept talking and talking about their work on the film Brainstorm. At some point, my dad says Chris told him what a great actress my mom was, how much he enjoyed working with her, and how important it was that she continue to work as an actress. My dad remembers feeling irritated by this statement—after all, my mom had three kids to take care of on top of her work—and so he told Chris, “I think it’s important you stay out of her life!”

  Before long my mom had had enough of the conversation and decided to go to bed, going down below to the stateroom where my parents slept. My dad stayed in the salon with Chris and the conversation continued, getting more and more heated. Again, my dad told Chris, “Stay out of her life!” even smashing a bottle of wine on the table to make sure his point had been made. Chris left the room and my dad followed him out onto the deck.

  To this day, my dad knows that his anger wasn’t justified. He had been drinking and he hadn’t slept well the night before. Out on the deck, in the cool sea air, he quickly calmed down, and the two men returned to the salon and talked for a while. Then Chris went to his cabin and my dad and Dennis cleared up the glass from the floor. Soon enough, my dad went below to go to bed.

  Right away, he realized my mom wasn’t in their stateroom where he expected to find her. He looked in the bathroom, she wasn’t there. He went out onto the deck. Where was she? He saw that the dinghy was gone. He went to find Dennis, saying, “Natalie’s not here!” Had she taken the dinghy to shore? That didn’t seem possible as the Splendour was only sixty feet long and anyone on it would have heard her starting up the dinghy as she left. But what other explanation could there be?

  My dad radioed for another shore boat, and went to Catalina to look for my mom. The restaurant where they’d eaten dinner that night was closed and there was no sign of Natalie or the dinghy in the dock. He came back to the Splendour. By now it was about 1:30 a.m. and he was frantic with worry. He called the Coast Guard, and they came out to the boat and looked over every inch of it. Then they started their search-and-rescue mission, the Coast Guard helicopters strafing the ocean with searchlights. My dad remembers waiting for what seemed like an eternity. Eventually, at around five thirty that morning, the Coast Guard found the dinghy in a cove near Blue Cavern Point on Catalina Island with the key in the off position, the gear in neutral, and the oars at its sides. Clearly my mom did not take out the dinghy; it had floated there. Two hours later, my mother’s body was found, wearing only her nightgown, red parka, and socks, in the ocean off the Catalina coastline.

  When my dad heard the news, he remembers feeling as if “everything just went out… went away from me.” His first thought was for his children. How was he going to tell us? Mart picked up my dad and Chris, and together they drove to my dad’s therapist, Dr. Arthur Malin, so my dad could ask him for guidance. Dr. Malin told him that he shouldn’t minimize what had happened, that he needed to tell us straight and then reassure us that we would always be a family. And then he came home.

  After my mom’s body was found, the coroner, Thomas Noguchi, and Sheriff Duane Rasure, along with a team of investigators and experts, analyzed all the evidence and reached the conclusion that Natalie Wood drowned accidentally. Our boat had a swim step that led down to the dinghy, made of teakwood. When it got wet, it was incredibly slippery. Everyone on the boat had been drinking for the better part of the day. My mother was petite; it didn’t take more than a glass or two of wine to make her tipsy. The coroner said her blood alcohol was at 0.14 (at a time when the legal limit for driving was 0.10). My mom had likely gone down to the d
inghy to fasten it more securely so it wouldn’t bang against the side of the boat, disturbing her while she was trying to sleep. She must have lost her footing on the swim step as she bent down to retie the dinghy, hitting her head and falling into the water. This is what everyone assigned to the case in 1981 believed happened. The original detective on the case, Duane Rasure, had never changed his assessment once in thirty years.

  For me, the wording on her death certificate may have changed, but my understanding of what happened to my mom remains the same. I have always understood that my mother slipped and fell, bruising her body and possibly ending up unconscious before she entered the water—but we can never know with complete certainty. The circumstances of exactly how Natalie Wood ended up in the water will never be clearly established because she was alone when she died. And so I focus on the things I do know, that as certain as I am that the earth is round, my father would never have harmed my mother or failed to save her if he knew she was in danger. I focus on my love for my mom, for my dad, for my family. I cultivate a mind of clover.

  Chapter 19

  Clover, Venice, California, 2013.

  When I was around three and a half months pregnant, Barry and I went to visit my dad at his condo in Westwood, a few days before Christmas, to have a drink with him and Jill. R.J. was in his early eighties then. He had let his dark hair turn gray. His blue eyes remained crystal clear. Despite the recent accusations, my dad was full of happiness for Barry and me, so delighted that he was going to be a grandparent again. Jill still had her bright red hair and gorgeous figure. The two of us have grown closer over the years, establishing a real friendship. Like my dad, she was deeply happy for me. I remember I was wearing a long red-and-white-striped dress, and I had a little bump on my tummy where Clover was growing.

  My dad told me he had a gift for me. He handed me a small box. In it was a necklace with a large gold charm in the shape of a clover. Along with the clover was a gold rectangular charm that said “Clover” on one side and “Love Grandad” on the other. Engraved on the back of the clover were the words: “R.J., you are lucky for me. Love Wat. 1955.” My dad’s dear friend Watson Webb had given him this clover charm in 1955.