When our family’s publicist Alan called to let me know that a podcast series had come out about my mother’s death, I immediately thought of the mama deer. In the coming days, it seemed like every time I looked at a newspaper or magazine there was a plug or mention of the podcast. There was a trend for “true crime” podcasts at the time and my mother’s story had somehow been morphed into a murder mystery, with my dad as the prime suspect, even though he has never been charged with any kind of crime. They had even used my mother’s words from her Ladies’ Home Journal draft in the series, claiming that it was a “never-before-seen-or-heard memoir” even though the words had already been published in our coffee-table book. The podcast went straight to the top of the iTunes charts. Suddenly we were thrown back into the tornado of supposition and speculation.
I made the decision not to listen to the podcast, but close friends did, and they filled me in. The usual people were interviewed for the series, pointing their fingers at my dad. Lana. Dennis Davern, the skipper. Marti Rulli, his cowriter. These were the same people who had campaigned for the LA County Sheriff’s Department to reopen the case of my mother’s death. For the podcast, however, Lana, Dennis, and Marti went one step further than they had in 2011. Apparently they now said that my dad had committed premeditated murder, planning to kill my mom, deliberately engineering events that weekend to execute his plan and cover it up afterward. Lana, Dennis, and Marti had no new evidence to support their claims. They had simply decided to say the words out loud. It was as if over the years, they had told their story so many times that they had completely convinced themselves of my dad’s guilt.
Throughout the podcast, the “facts” of my mom’s case were apparently presented without any journalistic due diligence. The producers seemed to be much more interested in proving my dad’s guilt than they were in telling a balanced and impartial account. Basic information that could have been easily fact-checked by the production team was blatantly wrong. My parents didn’t get married the second time on the Splendour. They didn’t even own the boat then—they got married on the Ramblin’ Rose. Laurence Olivier, Fred Astaire, and Rock Hudson didn’t carry her casket at her funeral. They were “honorary pallbearers,” and Laurence Olivier wasn’t even there. We soon learned that the host of the podcast was a longtime tabloid journalist, part of an entire industry that profits from celebrity scandal, blowing up clouds of smoke where there isn’t a fire.
Lana’s testimony for the podcast was apparently emotional and heartfelt, filled with claims of devotion to her sister while outright accusing Natalie’s beloved husband of murder. To this day I feel sorry for my aunt. She lost her sister in 1981 and her only child, my cousin Evan, to a heart attack in 2017 after a long battle with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. I am sorry for all of that. I am sorry for the frustration Lana feels over not being able to point her finger at a bad guy responsible for my mom’s death. But sometimes there are no bad guys. Sometimes accidents happen.
The original detective on my mother’s case, Duane Rasure, passed away in 2014 and could no longer dispute the claims made in the series. Without the lead investigator around to defend his own work, the producers were able to discredit his decades-old investigation. But the fact remains that Rasure and his team were there. None of the people making the podcast were part of the investigation in 1981. Do they know more about the accident than those who examined the case at the time? It is impossible for me to believe that they do.
I have lived with the confusion and controversy of the night my mother died for most of my life. I knew immediately at age eleven that we would never know exactly what happened that night because my mom was alone when she died. I had to make my peace with not knowing. I wish others could do the same. But it seems that when there are no details available about a death and no witnesses, this creates a fertile ground for speculation. The imagination can fill in the blanks. When that person is a celebrity—and a beautiful female celebrity who is gone too soon—the temptation to elaborate and invent is irresistible. My mother’s death, and the absence of information about what happened to her, has become a Rorschach test for people. What you see depends on who you are.
Our family is not close with Chris Walken, the other man on the boat that night, and I have never spoken to him about my mother. Walken did give one interview to Playboy in 1997, where he talked about what happened that night and his words resonate with my own understanding of why people remain so fixated on revisiting the night of her death.
“What happened that night only she knows, because she was alone,” Walken said in the interview. “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.…
“You hear about things happening to people,” Walken went on. “They slip in the bathtub, fall down the stairs, step off the curb in London because they think that the cars come the other way—and they die. You feel you want to die making an effort at something; you don’t want to die in some unnecessary way.”
Back in the early years after my mother’s death, Walken made one of his only other statements on my mother’s death, saying, “The people who are convinced that there was something more to it than what came out in the investigation will never be satisfied with the truth. Because the truth is, there was nothing more to it. It was an accident.”
My mother no longer has a voice of her own, but I do, and this is what I know to be true. My mother was not a tragic, doomed person. She was vibrant. Her life was devoted to her art, her children, her husband, and her heart. This is how she would want to be remembered, not as someone who is defined by her death, but by her life.
Epilogue
As soon as she was old enough, Clover and I began to watch my mother’s movies together. Just as my mom had watched me watching her in Miracle on 34th Street, I watched Clover watching my mother in the same film.
My five-year-old daughter sat in front of the TV, observing closely as tiny Susan Walker pulled skeptically on Santa’s beard.
“Mama, she’s my grandma?”
“Yes, Clover. That’s her as a little girl,” I tell her.
“She kind of looks like me,” Clover replies.
Clover takes after Barry in that she is tall for her age. She has pale blond hair and green eyes. But she has a nose and profile that are 100 percent my mom and me.
Clover loves to watch Grandma Natalie’s films, especially West Side Story. Her favorite part is the “I Feel Pretty” number, although she calls it “Maria and her friends.” She knows all the words to the song. Clover also loves The Green Promise, a picture my mother made when she was ten, the same film where she fell from the bridge and got the bump on her wrist. In the film, my mother plays a rural tomboy who loves animals, just as she did in real life. Clover loves animals too, so she really connects with seeing her grandmother on a farm surrounded by lambs and cows and horses.
When I watch my mother’s movies now, I’m filled with pride and the deep desire to protect her. What is this feeling? It didn’t take me long to recognize it as maternal love. When I see my mom on-screen, I feel like I’m her parent and she’s my daughter, and not the other way around.
My love for my mom these days is a lot like my love for Clover; I want to do right by them both. The mother-daughter cycle continues, and sometimes the barriers blur again, as they did when I was a child. Who is the mother, and who is the daughter? We are still entwined, mother and child. Except that I am her protector now. I did not know that I would feel this way.
I study my mom on the screen like an anthropologist, searching her face for clues about who she was, who she might have been today. In Gypsy, I see both aspects of her personality: the regular person backstage and the charismatic entertainer onstage. That’s just how I remember her. In a split second, she could switch from being my Mommie to a glamorous movie star. She could be intimate and cozy
, cooing, “Natooshie, do you want a glass of Ovaltine?” and giving me a warm hug. Then suddenly the cameras would click and she was Natalie Wood, the ravishing beauty with the dark, soulful eyes.
My daughter knows all about her grandmother, who she was, when she died, and how much we miss her. I want the two most important people in my life, my mother and my daughter, to have a relationship.
And Clover! How I wish my mom could meet this daughter of mine, her granddaughter. I marvel at Clover’s beauty, her light, her humor. This child was born a happy girl. As she grew, her personality emerged, determined and strong-willed like her grandma.
Clover is a Gemini, ruled by Mercury, the planet of communication. From the moment she was born, she was intent on expressing herself. She communicated with sounds and body language and her eyes before she had words. When we began to read books to her, words became her thing. She couldn’t get enough of them. She spoke clearly and with intent from a young age. At three and a half she told me, politely but firmly, to please take the purple rug out of her room and all the dresses out of her closet. She likes pants and sneakers, basketball and skateboarding. Clover has a crystal-clear conviction about who she is.
My sister Courtney is a big part of Clover’s life. Courtney is in a good place these days; she has been clean for four and a half years at the time of this writing. She finally realized she loved her life and her family more than she loved drugs. Not long after Courtney turned the corner with her addiction, Kilky had a heart attack on her ninetieth birthday. She always said she wanted to live to be ninety. Our beloved Kilky made her exit peacefully, surrounded by all her family and ours: Katie, my dad, Courtney, me.
Now my sister takes things day by day. She lives in Nashville with her best friend Alex and her dog Winnie. Since Courtney has come back into our lives, she has forged her own connection with Clover—one that has nothing to do with me, and everything to do with their shared love of music and mischief. Courtney still has a childlike way about her that entrances Clover.
“When is Courtney coming over, Mama? Can Courtney have a sleepover soon?”
Courtney is allowed to brush the tangles out of Clover’s hair (they share the same blond locks). Unlike me at that age, Clover doesn’t seem to mind. Courtney gave Clover her first pair of roller skates. Courtney and Clover are the ones in the kitchen eating Popsicles on a hot summer day, whispering funny stories in each other’s ears.
Courtney and I often talk about our mom when Clover is around. Last year, on the evening before Mother’s Day, I was giving Clover her nightly bath. That weekend, Courtney was staying over and so she came into the bathroom to sit with us. Clover was five at the time.
The conversation turned easily to Grandma Natalie. Courtney and I began to speculate on how different our lives might have been had our mom lived.
“I just can’t imagine what it would have been like to have a champion all these years,” Courtney said. “She could have helped us to figure out what we were going to do with our lives, babysat Clover, made fun of Daddy.”
“I know she would have loved email and cell phones… Instagram,” I point out. “She was such a great letter writer and communicator. I’m sure she would have written her own book by now.”
What would the world be like if my mom were still in it? Would she have continued to work as an actor as she matured? Some of her best acting performances may have been ahead of her for all we know. Before she died she was veering into writing, directing, and producing. Would she have put her acting career on pause as she moved behind the camera? If she were alive today, would she have lent her voice to the moment? Would she have come out in support of the Me Too movement, speaking honestly about her brushes with powerful, lascivious men when she was a young girl in Hollywood? I know she would have been at the forefront of demanding equal pay for women as she was throughout her life.
What about the little things? Would Courtney and I have a standing yoga or Pilates class that we would take with her? Would we meet at La Scala for chopped salads? Would we hike together in the Santa Monica Canyon? How much mother-daughter therapy would we have had? How would she have evolved as she aged? Would she have let her hair go gray and embraced her wrinkles, or had Botox or even a face-lift? Would she still paint her eyes chocolate brown?
Would my parents live on Canon Drive or would they have moved to the East Coast? My mom loved the city, with its theaters, museums, and glittering lights. She thought the combination of New York City and a place in upstate New York would have been a good fit for our family. My parents always said New York was a lucky city for them.
Would my mom and R.J. have worked out any wrinkles in their relationship and gone the distance? As I write this, my dad is on the verge of turning ninety. He lives most of the year in Aspen now. His voice is as robust and commanding as ever. He walks a little more slowly, but his mind is still open and seeking. We speak on the phone daily. We talk about my sisters, what animals he may have seen that day on his drive into town—a herd of buffalo, deer, maybe a fox. My dad has always loved nature and animals and he is happiest living among them. If I have a question about my mom, a certain period of time, a funny story I heard about her, he is there to clarify, or just to reminisce. Not long ago, I sent him the latest round of home movies that we had transferred to digital, including their windswept wedding on the Ramblin’ Rose, my dad looking so dapper in a white turtleneck and navy jacket, my mom a vision of femininity in her lavender wedding dress.
“Jesus, Natasha, what a long time ago all that was,” he says. “What a great life we had, huh? Nat was so beautiful—and look at the way she looked at you. God, she loved you.”
Time has not dulled the pain in his eyes or his voice when he talks about losing our mom. It is not an exaggeration or a cliché to say that a part of him died along with her that night. “If it hadn’t been for you and Courtney and Katie, I wouldn’t have made it,” he has said to me. I am grateful every day he found love again with Jill. They are a team, they take care of each other, they protect one another.
How would my mom’s friendship with Daddy Gregson have deepened as they both aged? My darling dad was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in his eighties and passed away in August 2019, after a brave battle with the illness. Despite his frail and compromised health in his final years, his mind remained sharp, his noble humor intact. For my entire life he had always been just a phone call or a flight away. Each time I called him, his voice would rise up an octave—“Hello, darling! Hello, Natasha!”—sounding so delighted to hear from me. I miss his crinkly eyes that laughed and cried at the same time, the stories around his dinner table, his gameness for fatherhood and life.
How would Courtney and I be different if our mom had lived? Would we have grown into young women who were confident in our abilities to travel far from home, graduate from college, pursue challenging careers and stable relationships? Would Courtney have skipped over her addictions and jumped right to being the grounded person she has become? Would I have felt that I needed to follow my mother into a career as an actor? I might have stayed in college and studied literature or art, perhaps even lived in Europe. Would all of life’s hills and valleys have been easier for us to navigate? I have to believe that my mother’s strengths would have made an immeasurable impact on all of us as we matured—me, my dad, Courtney, Katie, Mart, and our whole extended family. Our lives would have stayed intact, instead of being smashed into a million pieces and scattered in the wind. My dad’s life would not be marred by trumped-up scandals and accusations.
In the early hours of Mother’s Day 2017, I dreamed that my mother returned to me. Someone told me that she was in the next room. I was nervous to see her. I was a grown-up now—so different from when she last saw me. Would she remember me; would she like me?
There was my mom, looking beautiful in a pale purple 1970s ensemble. She wore her gold Elsa Peretti heart-shaped hoop earrings and a scarf tied around her head. Her eyes were made up with her signature dark e
yeliner. She smiled her familiar smile, but she was timid and slightly reserved with me. Our conversation was polite. I wanted her approval and to feel our mother-daughter bond. She seemed distant. There were so many questions I wanted to ask her, so much to say. “Mommie, you can’t believe how many times Daddy and Jill made Courtney and me go to the UK in the eighties!” She laughed her sweet maternal laugh. “Oh, Natooshie,” she said, and folded me in her arms. In the dream, there were no goodbyes, just a feeling of connection.
Sometimes, on a rainy morning, I can still hear her voice talking to my dad. I close my eyes and we are back on Canon Drive. The sky is dark and gray; fat drops of rain make tracks down the windows. My mom sits on her bed in her white flannel nightie. My dad is walking in and out of the room, to and from his closet down the hall, getting dressed to go to work on Hart to Hart.
“R.J., it’s raining so hard,” she says. “Don’t you think the girls should stay home from school today?”
“Whatever you think, Nat.” He would often readily agree with anything she said.
What was it about the rain that made her afraid for us to go to school? Was she worried that we would catch a cold? That our feet would get wet at recess? Was it the drive that seemed dangerous?
I will never know the answers to these and a million other questions.
Not a day has gone by since I lost her that I haven’t wished she were back, even if just for a few minutes. I will never again feel her warmth, her hugs, her hands gently stroking my hair. To resume my life as if I hadn’t lost the most important person in it would have been to live an impossible lie. But these are the pieces of my life and this is how I have arranged them.
Last November Barry, Clover, and I were in the backyard as the last rays of late-afternoon sun began to fade. Clover was playing with her Legos; Barry and I were having a glass of wine and listening to country music.
More Than Love: An Intimate Portrait of My Mother, Natalie Wood Page 27