Natalie Wood was terrified of dark water her whole life. Here’s what makes that absolutely unbearable to know.
The first time she almost drowned, she was just 10 years old. She was filming The Green Promise in 1949 when a bridge on set collapsed while she was halfway across it. She broke her wrist in the fall and the break was never properly set. She wore bracelets on that wrist for the rest of her life to cover the protruding bone.
The incident planted something that never left. Her own sister confirmed it. She wouldn’t even go near her home swimming pool. A “fortune-teller” once told her mother that Natalie would die in “dark water,” and her very superstitious mother made sure that warning was passed on to her daughter.
She carried that with her for 43 years.
She was born Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko in San Francisco, the daughter of Russian immigrants who changed the family name to Gurdin to avoid discrimination. Her mother pushed her toward acting before she could even read, and it worked. By the time Natalie was eight, she had a studio contract and had already starred in the beloved Christmas classic Miracle on 34th Street.
For an entire generation of moviegoers, she didn’t just become famous – the world watched her grow up in real time. She was the girl James Dean fell for in Rebel Without a Cause. She didn’t just play Maria in West Side Story; she was Maria.
She earned three Oscar nominations: Rebel, Splendor in the Grass and Love with the Proper Stranger, and not once did she get to take home the award she deserved. By that time, she’d made more than 50 films and was one of the most recognized faces in Hollywood.
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In 1957, she married actor Robert Wagner. They divorced in 1962, and in 1969 she married producer Richard Gregson. That ended too. Then in 1972, Wood and Wagner remarried in the kind of second-chance love story that Hollywood’s built on.
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They had a daughter together, and from the outside, it looked like everything was working out. But does anyone really ever know what’s going on in a marriage aside from the two main characters involved? Even then, sometimes one person thinks it’s unicorns and rainbows, and the other one is living in reality and plotting an escape.
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On the weekend of November 28, 1981, Wood and Wagner took their 60-foot yacht, Splendour, named after her film Splendor in the Grass, to Catalina Island for Thanksgiving weekend. With them were the boat’s captain, Dennis Davern, and her Brainstorm co-star Christopher Walken.
The Night Nobody Agrees On
What really happened on that Saturday is where every account starts to fall apart.
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Wagner and Walken had been drinking. At some point during the trip, a fight broke out between the two men, with Wood caught smack dab in the middle. Wagner has admitted to telling Walken to stay out of his wife’s career. Davern says it was far uglier than that – Wagner smashed a wine bottle on a table. After the argument, everyone went to bed.
Around 11 p.m., Marilynn Wayne, on a nearby boat, later told investigators she heard a woman screaming for help in the water, and a man’s slurred voice responding. She said she got a death threat afterward, telling her to keep quiet.
Davern says he actually heard the dinghy being untied from the side of the boat, and when he checked on Wagner, Wagner told him Wood was in the water and to “leave her, teach her a lesson.” He says Wagner ordered him not to turn on the boat’s lights to search for her. Wagner’s denied this version completely.
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Wagner called for help around 1:30 a.m., roughly two hours after Wayne said she heard a woman screaming. Wood’s drowned body was found floating in the ocean the following morning, about a mile from where the yacht was. She was only wearing a nightgown, socks and a down jacket. The dinghy was adrift nearby. She was just 43 years old.
The boat was never treated as a crime scene. The three men aboard were never physically examined. The investigation lasted two weeks. The chief medical examiner ruled it an accidental drowning and closed the case.
It stayed closed for 30 years.
In 2011, Davern, who’d kept quiet for decades, reportedly stayed in Wagner’s home for a whole year after Wood’s death went public. He said he’d lied to police and that the night was far more chaotic than anyone had let on. The sheriff’s department reopened the case.
The next year, the coroner amended Wood’s death certificate from “accidental drowning” to “drowning and other undetermined factors,” with bruising on her body flagged as potentially indicating an assault before she ever entered the water.
In 2018, the lead detective named Robert Wagner a person of interest. Wagner declined to be re-interviewed. By 2022, the sheriff’s department said all leads had been exhausted. No charges were ever filed.
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Natalie Wood made 56 films. She got three Oscar nominations and never won a single one. She spent her whole life afraid of dark water, and on a November night in 1981, the people on that boat with her still haven’t told the same story twice.
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