Natasha (61 page)

On the small island of Catalina, where Natalie was seen spending that peculiar, disoriented, intoxicated Friday night away from the boat, accompanied by Davern, and where she was witnessed again on Saturday with Walken at Doug’s Harbor Reef, appearing moody, inebriated, and flirtatious in front of a noticeably jealous R.J., speculation was darker. Michelle Mileski, the second waitress who served and observed the Wagners, the captain, and Walken that last night and had been bothered by the “bad vibrations” and jealousy she felt from R.J. toward Natalie and Walken at dinner. Some of the people with whom Mileski worked that night at Doug’s had a similar reaction to what they had witnessed.

Mileski discussed her thoughts in those first days and for months afterward with Whiting and Coleman, the host and the cook from Doug’s Harbor Reef, who had been intimately involved with the Wagners throughout that long, strange night.

Whiting made the call to the dinghy dock at 10
P.M
. to be sure Natalie, R.J., Walken and the skipper all got to the
Splendour
safely because they appeared so intoxicated, and he later intercepted R.J.’s first radio call for help at 1:30
A.M
. It was Whiting who initiated the search for Natalie, and he and Coleman were in the first shore boat to troll the coast for signs of her or the
Valiant
, spotting the dinghy around 5:30
A.M
. and using it to continue their search. Whiting and Coleman also sped their boat beside Doug Bombard’s when he retrieved Natalie from the dark waters off Blue Cavern Point, assisted by lifeguard Roger Smith.

Whiting and Coleman came to the same conclusion Mileski had when Natalie was found drowned and R.J.’s argument with Walken was disclosed. “At the time,” Mileski reveals, “we said, ‘Oh yeah, Wagner probably killed her.’ But I really don’t know what happened. I don’t believe she just went out in the dinghy and drowned. She didn’t go out on boats alone and was afraid of the dark. Whatever it was, it was just real sad.”

R.J., who had been in seclusion since he got home from Catalina, semi-sequestered himself in his bedroom in total darkness, barely getting out of bed, seeing only his doctor, his psychiatrist, and those closest to him,
clearly haunted by what happened to Natalie. As Katie, his daughter by Marion Marshall, then seventeen, would say later, “There’s his wife’s children, looking him in the eyes, and wondering where their Mommy is and how they’re gonna get through
life
. And he’s wondering the same damn thing: how’s
he
gonna get through life? ‘Where’s the love of my life?’”

Mud, who was under heavy sedation, finally told Lana, “I want to go and see R.J.” She would recall Olga and Lana taking her to the house on Canon that first day or so, so that she could look in the eyes of possibly the last person to see Natalie alive. “And I ask him, I said, ‘I know you won’t be able to tell me any details, because you know I’ll get too upset, but tell me please: ‘Did she suffer when she died?’ He said, ‘No, no,’ so that make me feel better.”

Olga remembers R.J. as “totally broken. He was lying on his big king-size bed and his two stepsons, Josh and Peter, were guarding the door. So I finally went upstairs and just walked through to the bed, where R.J. was. Anybody that saw him
then
would never suspect
him
of anything. The guy was looking for her all night.”

Lana was less trusting. She demanded to know details of what happened to her sister. R.J. said something different to Lana than he had to Detectives Rasure and Hamilton, whom he told Natalie had gone out in the dinghy. To Lana, R.J. said it was an accident; that Natalie had gone to bed while he and Walken were talking and that she must have fallen overboard. Lana asked her brother-in-law why he hadn’t heard a splash, or Natalie’s screams for help. R.J. told Lana that he didn’t hear anything, begging her to believe that it was an accident. Lana felt he could not look in her eyes.

Monday, November 30, the same day Noguchi held his press conference, Duane Rasure, the lead detective investigating Natalie’s drowning, told reporters for the
London Daily News
he was “putting together” Natalie’s last moments, based on the Sheriff’s Department’s detective work. “What we think is that Natalie Wood needed a breath of fresh air… and went out on the deck. Maybe she wanted to go out for a little float around. Maybe she decided to go for a swim.”

Army Archerd, a columnist at
Daily Variety
who had known Natalie and R.J. since the 1950s, spent part of that same Monday afternoon with anguished Hollywood friends of Natalie’s, such as Elizabeth
Taylor, Roddy McDowall, and agent Guy McElwaine, gathered in the living room and den of the Wagners’ home on Canon, where the mesmerizing poster of Natalie, as Anastasia, was propped against a wall, a haunting reminder of the play she would have been rehearsing were she alive. Walken came by for a while, Archerd reported, sitting near the bar, where he “stared out in space.”

R.J. wandered in, Archerd would write in his column, “his eyes wet with old and new tears,” mingling with Natalie’s stricken friends. According to Archerd, a few of them asked R.J. why Natalie got in the dinghy by herself that night, as he said in his press release issued the day before. Archerd heard R.J. murmur, “She often did, and the water was smooth as glass.”

The next day, Tuesday, December 1, Detective Rasure talked to Paul Connew of the
London Daily News
, suggesting, “Natalie may have fallen overboard from the yacht and knocked the rubber dinghy, which was moored alongside, adrift as she fell. Or she could have decided to take the dinghy out for a cruise.” Rasure told Connew that R.J. mentioned to investigators he was not alarmed when he first noticed Natalie and the dinghy were missing from the boat sometime before midnight, “because he knew that Natalie liked to go off alone.” Natalie, R.J. told sheriff’s investigators, often sat quietly in the dinghy, “soaking up the silence.”

The same day, a reporter with the
Los Angeles Times
asked Rasure to comment on the escalating gossip over the argument between R.J. and Walken, which Noguchi speculated led Natalie to try to get off the
Splendour
. “I’m hearing all kinds of rumors,” the lead detective told the
Times
. “But we don’t know… in four or five days, we will have all the answers.”

Natalie’s funeral on Wednesday, December 2, touched and stunned the Hollywood community in a way perhaps no celebrity’s had before. Natalie was not only beloved by the actors, directors, producers, and crews who worked with her and knew her, she was a
child
of Hollywood, taken tragically, while young and still beautiful; leaving behind two small, grieving daughters and a husband barely able to get through the services.

The honorary pallbearers were the legends with whom Natalie had grown up, literally, in the movies—Rock Hudson, Frank Sinatra, Sir
Laurence Olivier, Elia Kazan, Gregory Peck, David Niven, Fred Astaire—Hollywood royalty, like she was. In the background were the strains of a balalaika playing the Russian melodies she loved. The casket was laden with gardenias—a thousand gardenias—the fragrance that announced Natalie was in a room. “It was so tragic, and so sad,” recalls producer Martin Manulis, one of the guests.

Natasha, the daughter Natalie named for the identity and childhood she lost to become “Natalie Wood,” was “hysterical” when she found out her mother drowned, recalls Peggy Griffin. By the day of the funeral, Natasha—who had begged Natalie not to go on the boat—was almost supernaturally calm, perhaps because Natalie prepared her by telling her the truth she would die some day. Natasha wrote a private farewell note to her mother, which she had put in Natalie’s coffin, the way Natalie had placed Natasha’s and Courtney’s letters to Fahd, only a year before.

Eight-year-old Courtney, the “most wanted baby in the world” as Natalie once called her, was still in denial at the funeral, remembers Griffin. She would have a hard time, as years passed, accepting her mother’s death. “A lot of times in my dreams, for instance, she’ll come back, and I’ll just think, ‘Oh God! You’re here! Where have you
been?’
And she hasn’t been dead, she’s been somewhere else.”

R.J. performed his customary role, at Natalie’s star-studded funeral, as the Hollywood prince in the fairy tale union, picking up three gardenias and tenderly handing one to each of Natalie’s daughters, the three sisters, Katie, Natasha, and Courtney; bending over to kiss the casket in a final farewell to Natalie, a romantic gesture that was photographed and published in newspapers across the world, as had almost every gesture exchanged between R.J. and Natalie since their first publicity-arranged date in 1956.

“Weren’t we all lucky to have known Natalie?” a dazed Mud, heavily tranquilized, said to each person who came over to console her. “Weren’t we all blessed?”

The destroyed, displaced, delusional Maria met a fan outside the funeral who bore an uncanny resemblance to Natalie, and who said that her name was Natasha. Maria attached herself to “Natasha” for months afterward, introducing her to people as her secret, illegitimate daughter by her Russian sea captain, bizarrely fulfilling her long-ago pact with Natalie’s TV costar Robert Hyatt by offering him “Natasha”
as a substitute for Natalie, since Hyatt had kept his word not to “experiment” sexually with Natalie anymore. Mud carried on conversations, after Natalie drowned, “as if she were expecting her,” handing out studio glossies she continued to sign for fans as “Natalie Wood.” “She had to keep Natalie alive as much as possible,” recalls her nephew, Constantine Liuzunie. “She couldn’t let Natalie die, otherwise
she
would.”

Natalie was buried under a camphor tree near her late friend Norma Crane. Her final resting place was at Westwood Cemetery, where Marilyn Monroe, whose sad, solitary overdose at thirty-six had alarmed her, was in a crypt, amid a galaxy of other Hollywood stars still worshipped by fans leaving flowers on their graves. Ironically, Natalie’s fans would leave her pennies, like the coins Mud used to surreptitiously toss in front of her on the sidewalk, leading Natasha to believe she would have a charmed life.

The late writer Thomas Thompson, Natalie’s close friend of many years, wrote a tribute to her in
People
shortly after the funeral, dismissing the scandal and rumors that were swirling as to what happened the night she drowned, provoked by Noguchi’s disclosure of the argument that occurred before she went off the boat. Privately, Thompson, who delivered one of Natalie’s eulogies, expressed the same disquietude.

As he was riding in the Manulises’ car from Natalie’s funeral to a private wake given by R.J. on Canon, Thompson leaned in from the back seat. “He said, ‘I really have a very strange feeling about all of this,’ ” recalls Manulis. “Implying that we didn’t yet know the particulars of Natalie’s drowning. Tommy felt that it hadn’t been fully explored, or that it hadn’t been fully stated.”

R.J.’s last interview with investigators was December 4 from his bed, in his bedroom, where he was still in isolation, wearing pajamas. According to Rasure, it required the intervention of the sheriff, Pete Pitchess, to secure R.J.’s cooperation. As Rasure tells the story, R.J.’s lawyer, Ziffren, called Rasure “wanting to know why I wanted to re-talk to Wagner.” Ziffren then phoned Pitchess. “And the sheriff called me up to his office…” recalls Rasure. “Pitchess got on the phone, and the next day Wagner’s attorney called me and said, ‘You can have your meeting anytime you want it.’ The sheriff pulled his power on that one.”

Ziffren, who issued the press release setting forth what R.J. said happened the night Natalie drowned, was in the bedroom to advise R.J. during Rasure’s questioning.

In this final interview with police, R.J. offered a few more details about the events on the Friday and Saturday before Natalie died, but little more about the timeline immediately prior to and after her disappearance from the boat. R.J. told Rasure he went to Natalie’s bedroom and noticed she was gone, and they all observed that the dinghy was missing. Their first thought, R.J. said, was that Natalie had taken the dinghy to shore.

According to Rasure, “The only conclusion [R.J.] could come to” was that Natalie had gotten in the dinghy alone to go back to the restaurant.

Walken’s second and last statement repeated the theory that Natalie had gone ashore in the dinghy to return to the restaurant. He told Rasure he went to his cabin, and when he woke up the next morning, R.J. told him that Natalie might have drowned.

Davern offered nothing specific in his final statement about Natalie’s disappearance, merely confirming R.J. and Walken’s contentions they thought Natalie took the dinghy to shore.

On December 11, less than two weeks after Natalie drowned, the Sheriff’s Department pronounced the case closed.

“As the thing progressed,” Rasure explains, “my mind was getting made up and made up and made up, and I’m thinking this is verifying what I was thinking. I think I was totally satisfied within five days that this was an accidental drowning.”

According to Marilyn Wayne, no one in the Sheriff’s Department ever returned her phone calls to discuss the screams that she, her son, and John Payne say they heard of a woman’s voice near the
Splendour
, crying, “Somebody please help me, I’m drowning,” and a man or men’s voices mocking her the night Natalie disappeared.

Rasure discounted Payne’s and Wayne’s calls. “I’m not sure those people heard anything,” he states, suggesting they were “making it up,” or were remiss for not rescuing the woman in the water. Rasure claims he spoke to Payne and “got on his case pretty heavy… ‘Why didn’t you get in your boat and try to save a woman helpless out there?’ ”
Rasure does not remember whether he talked to Wayne, saying, “I don’t believe her, either. She just wanted to keep it on the bandwagon.”

Rasure’s speculation that the couple might be seeking publicity conflicted with the fact that they went to great lengths to keep Payne’s name, and Wayne’s son, out of the press. Wayne briefly spoke to a few reporters shortly after Natalie drowned, out of what she describes as frustration over her unreturned phone calls to the Sheriff’s Department, noted in police records.