Things You Didn't Know About Natalie Wood's Mysterious Death

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With the May 2020 release of the HBO documentary Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind, directed by Natalie Wood's daughter Natasha Gregson Wagner, attention has once again been renewed regarding the life of the famous actress. Her career-defining movies — among them Miracle on 34th Street, West Side Story, Rebel Without a Cause, and Inside Daisy Clover — changed the Hollywood landscape, and the course of film history, forever.

While Gregson Wagner's documentary places most of its emphasis on her mom's early days and ensuing career, the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of Natalie — who drowned off the shores of California's Catalina Island in November 1981 during a Thanksgiving weekend spent aboard the yacht she owned with her husband, Hart to Hart television actor Robert Wagner — are impossible to overlook.

Paired with the fact that Wagner — who always maintained his wife accidentally drowned after taking out a 13-foot motorized dinghy attached to their yacht for a nighttime ride — was named a person of interest in the case in 2018, reexamining the facts is practically compulsory. (That 2018 update came seven years after the case was reopened and Natalie's autopsy results were revised, categorizing the circumstances of her death as "undetermined.")

So, what led to the starlet's tragic demise at the age of 43? Let's take a look.

Part of what fueled Natalie Wood's fear of water was a story her mother told both the Rebel Without a Cause actress and her sister Lana Wood when they were young — a story of a prophecy that, in some way, might have been a self-fulfilling one, and above all, preventable.

As Lana relayed in an exclusive interview with OK! Magazine in 2018, the Wood sisters' mother, Maria Zakharenko, told her daughters that during her earlier years living abroad in China, a psychic proclaimed she would give birth to a "child that would be known internationally" and "somebody was going to die from drowning."

According to Lana, the story terrorized young Natalie, galvanizing her fear of open water and prompting her to never take swimming lessons. Her inability to swim, of course, played a huge part in the cause of her death, leading to the prophecy coming true.

Even worse is the idea that the story Natalie and Lana's mother told them was entirely a work of fiction. According to Lana, their mother Maria was a "manipulative" and controlling presence in their lives, and the story of the psychic and "dark waters" filled with portent could have been yet another way of controlling what she and her sister did in their day-to-day lives.

Natalie Wood first saw Robert Wagner when she was just 10 years old and swore she was "going to marry him" someday, per People. Years later, the pair met on Natalie's 18th birthday for a date arranged by their shared Hollywood studio and her prediction came true: They married each other not once, but twice. The two first tied the knot in 1957 after a year of courtship, but divorced five years later.

Natalie went on to marry producer Richard Gregson — the biological father of her daughter, Natasha Gregson Wagner — but the marriage, too, ended in divorce in 1972. After that, Wagner and Natalie reconnected and wed a second time, only three months after her divorce to Gregson was finalized. (By all accounts, Gregson and Natalie retained a good co-parenting relationship, with Gregson Wagner referring to both of her mother's paramours as her fathers). 

In a 1976 interview with People magazine, Natalie cast their reunion in the vein of a fairytale, telling reporters that she harbored a crush on Wagner, who was eight years her senior, since she was a little girl. To others, however, their union was the beginning of the end.

Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood weren't the only celebrities aboard the Splendour the night of the West Side Story star's tragic demise. Christopher Walken — who co-starred with Natalie in 1983's Brainstorm — was also on the 55-foot yacht, though any of the actor's insight as to what did or didn't happen has yet to be determined.

One of the only statements he's ever really given about that faterful night occurred nearly five years after during an interview with People. "I don't know what happened. She slipped and fell in the water," he claimed. His quick summation was followed by a sharp rejoinder and dismissal. "Look, we're in a conversation I won't have," admonished Walken before clamming up, "It's a f***ing bore."

As per Heavy, Walken touched briefly on the incident a little more than a decade later in an interview with Playboy, stating the "logistics" of the night pointed to an accident. "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," Walken concluded, "because the truth is, there is nothing more to it. It was an accident."

Considering Wagner's latest iteration of what happened posits it was Walken, not Natalie, who he was arguing with — a story which sharply contrasts Dennis Davern's — it might prompt Walken to either corroborate or deny Wagner's version of events. Walken hired an attorney after the case reopened.

Part of what sparked the initial reopening of the case was the questionable nature of how the findings gleaned from Natalie Wood's initial autopsy led the coroner to rule her death as accidental. Conspiracies that the coroner at the time, Thomas Noguchi, was paid off to downplay any suspicious injuries Natalie incurred the night she drowned range from unsubstantiated to far-fetched. However, it's most likely Noguchi did downplay them due to the actress' blood-alcohol level testing at .14%, pointing to extreme intoxication. 

In order to avoid sensationalizing the news at a press conference, Noguchi avoided anything that could potentially tarnish the Hollywood icon's reputation, therefore ruling her death accidental, as per Vanity Fair. It wasn't until decades later — after Dennis Davern came forward with his version of what happened that night and the case was reopened in 2011 — that Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran changed the initial ruling from "accidental" to "undetermined." The reason? A series of bruises and other injuries that couldn't be explained by drowning or hypothermia.

"The location of the bruises, the multiplicity of the bruises, lack of head trauma, or facial bruising support bruising having occurred prior to entry in the water," Sathyavagiswaran wrote in the autopsy report (via ABC News). "Since there are unanswered questions and limited additional evidence available for evaluation, it is opined by this Medical Examiner that the manner of death should be left as undetermined," the coroner added.

Though Robert Wagner was officially labeled a person of interest in 2018, Natalie Wood's sister Lana has spent decades rallying for authorities to reopen the case, all while pointing to a patriarchal Hollywood that only takes care of its own as the biggest impediment in her fight for justice. "You need to speak up to fraternal Hollywood," Lana told the New York Times in 2019, "and also understand the price that is paid for that type of life. Natalie paid dearly — with her life. Nothing was done about that."

Lana's decades-long battle to uncover the full truth about what happened to Natalie that night in 1981 culminated in a podcast interview in 2018. On Fatal Voyage: The Mysterious Death of Natalie Wood, she revealed (via Daily Mail) that like many survivors in the #MeToo movement, Natalie was sexually assaulted by a powerful, unnamed Hollywood figure at age 16 — a crime which Lana has wished to avenge ever since. Lana doubled down on the claim to Fox News.

"She is the one family member willing to cooperate in the investigation," Detective Ralph Hernandez, the lead homicide investigator in the case, told the Times. "We work for the victim's family. So we consider Lana Natalie Wood's family and that's who we're working for, to try and find out the truth about what happened to her sister. The case is going to stay open until we find out the truth of what happened."