Natasha (60 page)

It was equally mystifying that R.J. would think Natalie, who was terrified of dark water and never took the dinghy alone at night, would get into the
Valiant
by herself in the cold, drizzly midnight hours in choppy waves; or imagine that she was at the bar, which was closed. It was the first of several odd, contradictory explanations R.J. would offer for Natalie’s disappearance from the boat.

Whiting’s private notes of the radio contact from R.J. that night state that he “overheard
Splendour
calling the Harbor Patrol, and the Harbor Patrol had closed up and gone home, so [I] picked up and responded to R.J.’s call… he was extremely drunk. The calls were almost incoherent. But we did switch off to a different channel and discussed the matter.” According to Whiting’s notes, R.J. “didn’t want to call the Coast Guard. He arranged that [I] would start a local search.” Whiting’s impression was that R.J. “didn’t want all the publicity for a missing wife if she was just hanging out at the bar or something.”

By happenstance, Paul Wintler, an employee who lived on the campgrounds in Two Harbors, had been awakened by loud music just before 1:30 and turned on his radio monitor to pick up the emergency airwaves. Wintler overheard R.J.’s radio distress call to Whiting and immediately got in touch with Whiting to offer his help.

Astonishingly, the search for Natalie Wood, who was missing in the Pacific Ocean off Catalina Island, proceeded at the direction of a
restaurant host at Doug’s Harbor Reef instructing a campgrounds maintenance man.

Wintler looked around shore for Natalie, and then checked the pier for the
Valiant
. When he didn’t see Natalie or the dinghy, the campgrounds employee borrowed Harbor Patrol Boat #10 to go out to the
Splendour
to talk to R.J., around two in the morning. Wintler described R.J. to police as “drunk and a little panicky.” He told Wintler he and Natalie “had a fight,” and R.J. thought she was going to the bar at Doug’s. He asked Wintler to drop him off at shore so he could look for her, even though the bar/restaurant—the only public place in rugged Two Harbors—was closed.

Wintler used the Harbor Patrol boat to drop R.J. off at the pier at Two Harbors and began to search the dark waters off Catalina for Natalie or the dinghy sometime after two A.M. “I kind of figured out which way is the wind blowing,” he recalls, “and I kind of went along the shore… and I didn’t find anything.” After fifteen minutes or so, R.J. flagged down Wintler from the pier to take him back to the
Splendour
, “agitated” that Wintler couldn’t find Natalie. “He was saying, ‘Where is she?’ and I can’t answer, and after a while you get tired of that.”

R.J. repeated to Wintler he believed Natalie was in the dinghy; though strangely, he never mentioned to Wintler, the person searching for Natalie, that she was a weak swimmer, that she would not go in the dinghy alone at night, or that she was afraid of the water.

Wintler brought R.J. back to the
Splendour
around 2:30
A.M
., “thinking, ‘I got to call somebody [for help].’ ” By that time, Don Whiting and his boat mate, Bill Coleman, the cook at Doug’s Harbor Reef, had arrived at the Two Harbors pier, where they coordinated with Wintler to expand their makeshift search for Natalie, sending a few local residents in harbor boats to patrol the water.

Shortly after 2:30
A.M
., by Whiting’s statement, he and Wintler realized they needed guidance in their amateur search for a movie star lost at sea. They decided to awaken the local harbormaster, Doug Oudin, since R.J. did not want them to alert the Coast Guard or Baywatch. Oudin quickly got dressed and took a skiff out to the
Splendour
, where he encountered R.J. and Davern, “buddies sitting around in the boat drinking.” Walken, at that time, was in his cabin. The skipper and R.J. were so intoxicated they could barely stand up or
form a sentence, according to Oudin. “There’s no doubt about it. They had trouble
talking
to me.”

Oudin tried to get details from R.J. and the captain to assist him in the search for Natalie and the
Valiant:
“What kind of dinghy is it, how much fuel did you have… did she know how to run the boat, how was she dressed? They didn’t really know much.” R.J. and Davern contradicted R.J.’s earlier explanation that Natalie had gone to the bar. “They said… they saw no reason that she would have gone ashore again.”

Both R.J. and Davern told the harbormaster they thought Natalie was wearing a nightgown at the time she disappeared from the boat, making R.J.’s 1:30
A.M
. radio call to Whiting reporting that she had taken the dinghy to go to the bar both contradictory and peculiar. Neither the skipper nor R.J. offered any reason for Natalie’s disappearance. “They just said, ‘We noticed the dinghy is gone, and she’s gone.’ ” Davern and R.J. told Oudin that Natalie had gone to bed, “and she just didn’t want to sit around with the boys while they were drinking and partying.” R.J. didn’t say anything about “the fight” he had with Natalie, which he mentioned to Wintler.

Oudin noticed “they were very panicked, especially Wagner. He was distraught. He said, ‘What are you doing? Do something.’ He was extremely upset.” At the same time, both R.J. and Davern asked Oudin not to contact the Coast Guard. “They said, ‘We want to keep this kind of low-key.’”

In contrast to what he told Wintler and Whiting, that he thought Natalie was on the dinghy, R.J. told Oudin it was “completely out of character” for Natalie to take the dinghy out at night alone. “He said she wouldn’t have.” R.J. also told Oudin that Natalie was afraid of the water.

The harbormaster left R.J. and Davern sometime around 2:45
A.M
. to arrange for an expanded search, thinking he was going to find Natalie with the dinghy. Both men, he observed as he got in his skiff, “were scared-looking.”

Oudin arranged for five little harbor outboards to search the beach, sending one boat to Emerald Bay and another toward Blue Caverns, searching the coastline. He sent Wintler on a “land patrol” up to the campground. After forty-five minutes, Oudin took his skiff back to the
Splendour
, informing R.J. he was “not having any luck” and had no choice but to call the Coast Guard, agreeing not to mention Natalie’s name. Whiting, who was with Oudin, recalled R.J. and Davern as “a
little dazed.” Whiting told police, “The skipper said to R.J., ‘Boss, do you think she could have gone to the mainland?’ and Wagner said, ‘Yes, that’s a possibility.’”

Oudin finally made the call to the Coast Guard at 3:30 A.M.

Meanwhile, a few small Isthmus harbor boats, manned by volunteers, continued to sweep the shark-infested waters off Catalina for signs of Natalie or the
Valiant
.

The first call to a Baywatch lifeguard to begin a search for Natalie in the 85- to 100-foot, 54-degree waters around the
Splendour
, and in the Isthmus harbor, was not until 5:15 on Sunday morning, six hours after she disappeared from the boat. The Coast Guard initiated the call to a pair of experienced divers named Roger Smith and Jean-Claude Stonier, who in turn called Bill Kroll at the Sheriff’s Department in Avalon.

While Smith and Stonier dove under the
Splendour
between 5:30 and 6:00
A.M
., searching for Natalie, Deputy Kroll questioned Robert Wagner.

R.J. told Kroll that he, Natalie, Walken, and Davern had been drinking in the main cabin of the boat “when we realized Natalie wasn’t around. We searched the boat and found the Zodiac dinghy was missing. We then thought that Natalie had gone ashore to the bar. This all took place around 12 midnight. When she didn’t return by 1:30
A.M
., I got on the radio and called the Isthmus to see if she was there. I got a hold of some guys who worked at the Isthmus and asked if they could check the Isthmus for Natalie… they contacted the Coast Guard.”

R.J.’s statement to the local Sheriff’s office detailed his actions after 1:30
A.M
., but failed to account for the critical hours from the time they knew Natalie was missing from the boat—between 10:45 to midnight—and 1:30, when he finally made his first distress call on the ship radio. Moreover, R.J.’s explanation for why and how Natalie left the
Splendour
—to take the dinghy ashore by herself to the bar—was something he had already told the harbormaster Natalie would never do.

At the same time R.J. was giving his statement to Kroll and divers were searching in the choppy waters around the
Splendour
, the night manager and the cook from Doug’s Harbor Reef spotted the
Valiant
tangled in kelp inside a small cave at Blue Cavern Point, where it had drifted about one and a quarter miles northeast of the Isthmus pier.

According to the police statements of Whiting and Coleman (both now deceased), the key was turned off, in neutral, with the oars still in
place, suggesting that Natalie had never been in the dinghy. The two boat mates also noted there was a wine bottle inside the
Valiant;
presumably the third bottle that Davern and Walken had retrieved from the
Splendour
for dinner the night before.

However, Roger Smith, one of the Baywatch lifeguards, asserts that he and his diving partner found the dinghy. “We swam it out of the cove… and when we swam it out, all the oars were in disarray. Everything was in disarray, as if somebody had been trying to climb back into it.” Smith also noticed “scratch marks” on the
Valiant
.

Whiting later told police that once the
Valiant
was taken out of Blue Cavern Point, he and Coleman used it to continue the search for Natalie. As a result, the dinghy’s evidentiary value was compromised, which lifeguard Smith found typical of the search for Natalie Wood. “Several errors were made. The one thing was not calling us out to begin with, to search for her, soon after she was missing… they had
shore boat operators
out there looking for her!”

The discovery of the dinghy at 5:30 A.M., with no Natalie, was an almost certain indication that her worst fear came true, and she had been helpless in deep, dark seawater.

The grim drama reached its nightmarish final act at first light, when Doug Bombard, the owner of Doug’s Harbor Reef, who had the flu the night before, joined the search team at the Isthmus, using a small Harbor 4 patrol boat. “I was hoping that we’d find her clinging to the rocks or sitting up on the hill. I kept running the boat right up next to the beach, thinking that if she had drowned, that she’d probably be inside the kelp line, because the current comes down the island and swings in.”

While Bombard was trolling about a hundred to a hundred fifty yards off Blue Cavern Point, close to 7:45
A.M
., “I saw something red, and that was her down jacket. It ballooned up, and had enough air so it acted as a kind of life preserver.” Bombard used his boat radio to alert Baywatch he thought he had spotted Natalie. Lifeguard Roger Smith immediately radioed back to the Isthmus Harbor Patrol to alert Bombard to locate her but not touch her “because we might be talking about a homicide. I wanted to recover her onto the Baywatch. And so I saw them speeding over there really fast, and Doug pulled her out of the water just as we got there.” Smith was too late.

Bombard steered the boat closer to the jacket, discovering what he hoped he would not find. “Natalie was hanging underneath the jacket, which buoyed her. A lot of times when a person drowns, if they don’t have a lot of fat, they go to the bottom. There was only one thing that kept her up, and that was that coat. She wasn’t floating, she was hanging, actually, almost in a standing position, with her face down and her eyes open.”

Underneath the red jacket, Natalie had on a floral print flannel nightgown, no undergarments, and blue slipper/socks, not the way Natalie Wood would dress to go to a bar. Coroner’s records would note she was wearing four rings, an I.D. bracelet on her right wrist (a gift from R.J. she kept on always), and a gold chain around her waist. There was no cuff bracelet on her left wrist—suggesting that Natalie did not intend to go anywhere, for she would not have been seen in public without The Badge. She had died as Natasha, not as “Natalie Wood.”

Smith, the lifeguard who assisted Bombard in lifting her out of the water that morning, was struck by how beautiful Natalie was.

“All I remember is her eyes.”

DOUG BOMBARD
,
WHO SPOTTED NATALIE IN
the dark waters off Catalina, was one of the many who tortured themselves with
if only
when she was found drowned. He was distressed that the harbormaster—who himself was not informed by anyone on the
Splendour
that Natalie was missing until 2:30
A.M
.—had waited until daybreak to call him to assist in the search.

“I thought, ‘Goddammit, I wish they’d have said something.’ ’Cause you always think—as far as winds and currents and things like that are concerned, I probably am the authority in the area—and you think that maybe just a little better knowledge about the area might have saved her. But in this case, I don’t think that would have been a factor, because I think by the time Bob called, probably it was too late.”

Smith, the Baywatch lifeguard who was notified when R.J. finally agreed to call the Coast Guard at 3:30
A.M
., approximately four hours after he noticed Natalie missing, had the same nightmares. “She didn’t need to drown… had there been a search by professional lifeguards like us, we would have been out there searching for her, following the current from the boat and stuff, so we probably would have found her
hanging off of that stupid craft… she’s the only one I’ve lost like that. And it was just a sad bunch of circumstances.”

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department rotation elected Detective Duane Rasure, a good-natured, self-described cowboy in his forties whose wife, ironically, idolized Natalie Wood, as the investigator sent to Catalina early that Sunday morning to find out how she came to disappear from the
Splendour
the night before, wearing only a flannel nightgown and a quilted jacket.

On his way, Rasure stopped at the heliport in Long Beach to question R.J. and Walken, who were flown back to the mainland as a courtesy by a Sheriff’s Department helicopter, two hours after Bombard found Natalie off Blue Cavern Point. R.J. had asked the skipper to stay in Two Harbors to identify Natalie’s body.

By the time sheriff’s investigators took statements from R.J. and Walken the end of that long Thanksgiving weekend, news that Natalie Wood had been found floating near a cove off Catalina Island was on radio and television, sending shock waves around the world, inciting international gossip. Los Angeles coroner Dr. Thomas Noguchi, who had been notified of the drowning around 8:00
A.M
. and had already sent his investigator, Pamela Eaker, to examine Natalie’s body, wrote later, “That first morning the whispers were of murder.”

Rasure met with R.J. at 9:54
A.M
. Sunday to interview him about the events leading to Natalie’s drowning. Less than six minutes later, at 10:00
A.M
., R.J. was released. This, in paraphrase, is the sheriff’s complete report of R.J.’s statement for police of what happened that night:

Rasure noted in his report: “Mr. Wagner was in an emotional state at this time, at this interview, so it was terminated.”

The detective was satisfied with R.J.’s explanation. “Really, I had the basics of what I needed,” he states, acknowledging that he was already forming the opinion that “it was an accident.” According to Rasure, the Sheriff’s Department viewed Natalie’s death that morning as “nothing more than a big-time celebrity drowning, in our minds. I’ve
got nothing so far to make me think that anything’s wrong. We had an accidental drowning.” He did not ask R.J. how he believed Natalie went overboard.

Moments after he spoke to R.J., Rasure met with Walken in an office at the heliport. Rasure and his partner, Detective Roy Hamilton, spent a few more minutes with Walken than they had R.J. Rasure found Walken forthcoming, and he provided more details than R.J. had, but he was equally vague about the events surrounding Natalie’s disappearance. After discussing “the beef” between himself and R.J., Walken told Rasure that Natalie went to her room. Walken thought she had gone to bed:

After taking R.J.’s and Walken’s statements on the fly, Rasure and Hamilton departed for Catalina to interview people on the Island who had seen Natalie that weekend, and to take a statement from Davern. The skipper, who had just completed the gruesome task of identifying Natalie’s body, was questioned at greater length by the two detectives than either R.J. or Walken, providing an equally hazy account of how Natalie got off the boat and of his, R.J.’s and Walken’s activities before and after. Davern told police:

Mud had spent Saturday night at Lana’s house when a friend of Lana’s woke them up by phone Sunday morning to tell them she heard on television Natalie had drowned off Catalina. R.J. had not phoned to break the news to Natalie’s mother or to her younger sister, though he made several calls from Bombard’s office in Two Harbors before flying back to the mainland, including one to Mart Crowley, and another to make arrangements for a child psychologist to counsel Natasha and Courtney.

Lana wept incessantly. Maria let out a primal scream and fell to the floor, shaking convulsively, just as she first had in childhood when she saw her brother hanging in front of the family’s house in Siberia. When she opened her eyes, she was in a hospital; too drugged, at first, to recall the awful news. “Suddenly I remember and I started to scream again. I said, ‘No! I wanna go, and find Natalie is alive. She is
alive!
It couldn’t happen to her.’”

The twisted genius who had created “Natalie Wood,” the intertwined movie star alter ego of mother and daughter, did not want to go on without her other half. “I don’t wanna live. I didn’t eat. I didn’t sleep,” she described to a friend later. “I was losing three, four pounds a day. Imagine. I didn’t care. I wanna die, I wanna be with Natalie. I just didn’t want to live without Natalie, couldn’t live without her. She was my whole life. She was so much part of me.”

Olga immediately flew to Los Angeles on Sunday to see her mother through the only crisis that ever threatened Maria’s indomitable Russian spirit. Maria’s kindly, most contented daughter, who was going through her own grief accepting that Natalie had drowned, reflected back on her shared childhood with Natasha, remembering how afraid she used to be to even wash her hair, terrified she was going to drown because of the gypsy’s dark prophecy to their mother. Olga said to Mud, when she arrived in L.A., “I guess the gypsy was wrong, and that it was
Natalie
who was going to die that way, not you—so you can relax now.” Her mother, she would recall, “just looked at me.”

Lana, who had lived in the shadow of her famous older sister for all of her life, felt that the gypsy was right, saying later, “My mother basically
did
die when Natalie drowned.”

Mud spoke in theatrical whispers, under her breath, about the
Splendour
, “the boat that took her away,” sobbing, when she regained
consciousness, at the thought of Natalie. A Russian Orthodox priest finally told her, “Don’t cry about Natalie. You’re drowning her with tears. You’re hurting her.” “That did it,” Maria would say later, explaining how she was able to go on.

Mud stopped weeping, but her spirit seemed to have departed with Natalie. “Every morning, ten o’clock,” she said later, “it doesn’t matter what Natalie was doing, even if she was in a studio, she would call me: ‘Mud? Are you okay? Everything is fine?’
Every
day. She called me. So every ten o’clock, I feel sad.”

Monday, November 30, the day after Natalie’s body was found in the sea off Blue Cavern Point, as the public outpouring of grief, shock, and gossip over her unexplained departure from the
Splendour
in a nightgown began to intensify, R.J. issued a statement through his lawyer, Paul Ziffren, offering his explanation of what happened:

At least half of what R.J. offered by way of explanation, through his lawyer, appears to be untrue: he was not joining Natalie in their stateroom, she did not often take the dinghy out alone, he did not look for her within ten or fifteen minutes, he
had
no small cruiser, and he did not immediately contact the Coast Guard.

That same day, Dr. Thomas Noguchi held a press conference to disclose his initial findings on the cause, manner, and circumstances of
Natalie’s drowning; compelled, he would say later, to respond to what he described as “extraordinary interest among the news media,” and to “rumors of foul play as well as of sexual scandal.”

Dr. Noguchi informed reporters that Natalie fell from the
Splendour
, speculating that she was trying to get into the dinghy from the swim step at the stern, to “separate herself from the group.” The coroner’s initial opinion was that Natalie hit her head on either the boat or the dinghy, which was tied to the stern, and she plunged into the sea. Noguchi based his theory that Natalie may have hit her head on a scratch, or “abrasion,” he found on her left cheek. “There is no evidence of foul play,” he said.

The coroner stated that Natalie was “slightly intoxicated,” revealing that she had .14% alcohol in her system at the time of her autopsy, what Noguchi described as the equivalent of “seven or eight glasses of wine.” Natalie’s level of intoxication, he suggested, “was one of the factors involved in her not being able to respond in case of emergency after she was in the water.”

In his question-and-answer session with reporters afterward, Noguchi was asked why Natalie would want to “separate herself” from the men on the boat. One journalist asked if there had been a dispute between Walken and Wagner. According to Noguchi, he conferred for a moment with his assistant coroner, Richard Wilson, who had been briefed on the sheriff’s investigation by Rasure’s partner, Roy Hamilton. Noguchi asserts that Wilson whispered to him that Hamilton informed him there was an argument between Walken and Wagner. Noguchi further claims that reporters overheard the comment in the microphone, setting off a bombshell at the press conference, with journalists demanding to know what kind of an argument occurred between Wagner and Walken. Wilson, who had met with Detective Hamilton, told reporters it was “nonviolent.”

When the media released Noguchi’s findings, initial opinion, and the revelation of an argument between Walken and R.J., gossipmongers whipped into frenzy, conjuring up sensational scenarios to suggest why Natalie would “storm off” the boat from R.J. and Walken. The tabloids leapt on the story, quoting “unnamed sources” on
Brainstorm
who said that Natalie and Walken were having an affair. The speculation in Hollywood circles ranged from a jealous love triangle to a rumor that Natalie walked in on a tryst between R.J. and Walken on the boat,
provoking her to flee in the dinghy. “That was the talk on the party circuit,” recalls Natalie’s former TV costar Robert Hyatt, then a director.