We’ll know more this afternoon after the lead Los Angeles detective on the case holds a press conference, but according to an interview with the man who captained the boat the night of Natalie Wood’s 1981 drowning, the finger is pointing at actor Robert Wagner.
On November 28, 1981, Wagner and Wood were nine years into their second marriage (they had married 1957, divorced in 1962, and then remarried in 1972). According to most reports, they were partying on a yacht with Christopher Walken, Wood’s “Brainscan” “Brainstorm” co-star. They were anchored near Catalina Island in Southern California, and according to the coroner’s report, Wood, died trying to leave the yacht or after trying to secure a dinghy that was banging against the yacht’s side. Everyone was partying and she had a lot of alcohol in her system.
There are plenty of rumors that one of the reasons Wood might have wanted to leave the yacht was due to an argument breaking out between Wagner and Walken, maybe even over Wood. I’ve read that things got so heated Wagner smashed a champagne bottle and in his 2008 auto-biography the actor not only blames himself for her death but confirms the drinking and the argument with Walken:
Wagner wrote that despite various theories about what led Wood to the water, which she feared, it was impossible to know what exactly happened.
“Nobody knows,” he wrote. “There are only two possibilities; either she was trying to get away from the argument, or she was trying to tie the dinghy. But the bottom line is that nobody knows exactly what happened.”Later in the book, Wagner wrote, “Did I blame myself? If I had been there, I could have done something. But I wasn’t there. I didn’t see her.”
He wrote that he has never returned to Catalina Island.
Of course the fourth person on the yacht was ship’s captain, Dennis Davern, who on the thirtieth anniversary of the actresses tragic death has decided to come forward and tell us Wagner is not only responsible but that he conspired to get everyone’s story straight before the police arrived and refused to allow the Captain to use a spotlight during the search. Two years ago Davern wrote a book about the incident and apparently didn’t mention any of this. UPDATE: In a CNN interview Davern and his co-author state the book does reveal this new information.
As someone who just the other day fell back in love with Natalie Wood after a screening of “West Side Story,” I would of course like to be sure that what we’ve officially been told happened, did.
At the same time, Robert Wagner is 81 years old, and the fact that we’re only a few days away from the 30th anniversary of this tragedy smacks of opportunism. If the anniversary spurred Davern’s conscience, that’s one thing, but if he’s looking for attention (why the television interview?) or a payday at the expense of a man nearing the end of his life, that’s a second tragedy.
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