the splendour yacht

The yacht tied to actress Natalie Wood’s mysterious 1981 death is out of Oahu waters

HONOLULU, Hawaii (HawaiiNewsNow) - A boat that was once a crucial piece of evidence in a Hollywood homicide investigation has finally been removed from Honolulu waters.

The yacht “Splendour” is now a sitting scrap heap. On Tuesday, the state hauled the vessel from the Ala Wai Harbor. It’s been sitting there unused for over 20 years as it changed owners.

But it was once owned by actor Robert Wagner who was questioned in 1981 following the death of his wife, actress Natalie Wood.

Wood is said to have fallen from the boat one night, yet conflicting witness statements from Wagner, actor Christopher Walken, and the boat’s captain led to an extensive investigation.

For years, her death was classified as an accident until new witnesses emerged and the case was reopened in 2011. Authorities now consider Wagner a person of interest.

The vessel itself has racked up nearly $12,000 in illegal mooring fees, and it will cost the state almost $14,500 to get rid of the yacht.

The DLNR adds that the boat was in extremely poor condition and was in danger of sinking.

To this day, no one has ever been arrested in connection to Wood’s death.

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Natalie Wood’s Fatal Voyage

By Sam Kashner

I found my love in Avalon beside the bay, I left my love in Avalon and sail’d away. —From the song “Avalon,” made popular by Al Jolson.

‘This is the Splendour, needs help.” With those words, 51-year-old actor Robert Wagner and Dennis Davern, the captain of Splendour, sounded the alarm around 1:30 A.M., on November 29, 1981, that Wagner’s wife, Natalie Wood, had disappeared from the 60-foot yacht the couple owned. Approximately six hours later, Wood’s body, clad in only a flannel nightgown, red down jacket, and blue wool socks, was found floating facedown in the Pacific about a mile away, 200 yards off Blue Cavern Point on Catalina Island. Just to the south, Prince Valiant, the 13-foot inflatable dinghy belonging to Splendour, had washed up on the rocks, its ignition key switched to “off,” the gearshift in neutral, and the oars up in a locked position.

The death of the 43-year-old actress stunned Hollywood. “It’s hard to describe the horror of this thing,” said Fred Astaire, a family friend who had played the father of Wagner’s character from 1968 until 1970 in the popular television series It Takes a Thief. As both the Coroner’s Office and the Sheriff’s Department began to investigate, rumors and questions swirled in Hollywood: What had brought Wood, whose fear of deep water was legendary, to leave the yacht in the middle of a cold, starless night and board the dinghy?

“I’m afraid of water that is dark,” she had told a journalist just weeks before her death.

As the details of the weekend surfaced, the questions multiplied. Wood had invited the actor Christopher Walken , then 38, with whom she had been filming a science-fiction thriller called Brainstorm, to be her guest aboard Splendour over the Thanksgiving weekend. The Wagners, accompanied by Walken and Davern, had sailed to Catalina Island, 22 miles off the California coast, leaving around noon on Friday, November 27. They anchored off Avalon, the island’s main town, and went ashore for shopping and a few beers, leaving Davern behind. The following afternoon they sailed to Isthmus Cove, an isolated spot at the northern end of the island with a tiny community that caters to yachtsmen. They dined that evening at Doug’s Harbor Reef, the only restaurant on the cove. Some of the restaurant’s staff thought the Wagner party was drinking rather heavily and later remembered volatile behavior on Wood’s part. After the group departed, Don Whiting, the restaurant’s manager, warned Kurt Craig, the harbormaster, to keep an eye out for their safety. They boarded Valiant at about 10 and motored back to Splendour .

What happened next, aboard the yacht, has been a subject of continuing speculation and innuendo. What is definitely known is that Wood retired for the evening. Sometime later Wagner went to check on her and discovered that both she and the dinghy were missing.

A few days after the tragedy, John Payne and his girlfriend, Marilyn Wayne, a Los Angeles commodities broker, contacted police to say they had been sleeping aboard a boat, Capricorn, which was moored near Splendour that night. Around midnight Payne heard a woman yelling, “Help me, someone please help me!” The voice was coming from near the stern of Splendour and, Payne believed, from someone in a dinghy. He awakened Wayne, who heard the cries, too. The couple claimed they hadn’t responded because a loud, drunken party was raging on another nearby yacht, and they had thought someone was just “playing around.” Indeed, they had heard a man’s very drunken voice respond mockingly, “O.K., honey, we’ll get you.” They believed the voice belonged to someone at the party, which evidently reinforced their notion that the whole thing was a joke.

The public face in the ensuing investigations was that of Thomas Noguchi, chief medical examiner in the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office. The autopsy revealed that Wood had died of drowning, and that her body had “superficial skin bruises” on the arms and lower legs and a vertical abrasion on the left cheek, such as might have been caused by falling into the water. The toxicology report showed that her blood-alcohol level was at least .14 percent—.04 percent above the level used in California to determine intoxication in automobile drivers.

At a November 30, 1981, press conference to announce the autopsy results, Noguchi trod gingerly, downplaying Wood’s apparent inebriation at the time of her death and any other sensational aspects of the case. The coroner was already under fire for his handling of the death of actor William Holden, who two weeks earlier had emptied a bottle of vodka in his Santa Monica apartment and then tripped, gashing his forehead on a bedside table. He had bled to death, according to Noguchi, probably because he was too drunk to stanch the wound or call for help. (By a strange coincidence, Holden’s longtime companion was Stefanie Powers, Robert Wagner’s then co-star in the hit television series Hart to Hart. The romantic chemistry on the show had generated speculation about a real-life romance between the two TV stars.) The Hollywood community was outraged that Noguchi had revealed Holden’s drunkenness to the press, feeling it was an invasion of the deceased actor’s privacy.

From the physical evidence in the Wood case Noguchi concluded that the actress had fallen into the water while trying to board the dinghy; fingernail scratches on Valiant’s side showed she had tried to hoist herself up from the water, but since her down jacket would quickly have become waterlogged, she was probably impeded by the extra weight. Evidently she never thought to remove the jacket, perhaps because her judgment was clouded by alcohol. She clung to the dinghy’s side as it drifted away from Splendour and the other boats in the harbor, until, finally, overcome by exhaustion and hypothermia, she drowned.

Before his press conference, Noguchi outlined this theory to his staff, only to have one of his colleagues point out, “What the reporters out there are really interested in, Dr. Noguchi, isn’t so much whether Natalie Wood was intoxicated or not, but why she left the yacht in the middle of the night. ”

Realizing the truth of that statement, Noguchi later wrote, he commissioned a “psychological autopsy” to find out why Wood “felt she should separate herself from her husband and Walken that night.” However, when the report “on the real facts of the death of Natalie Wood” came in, Noguchi “decided not to release the document to the press. It added details the media would only call ‘gory’ and ‘sensational.’ The report did not alter the official coroner’s conclusion of an accidental drowning. So, rather than create more media indignation over ‘too many details,’ I reluctantly filed away that report.”

By Savannah Walsh

By Kase Wickman

By Bess Levin

Noguchi’s discretion failed to save his job; complaints from Frank Sinatra and the Screen Actors Guild, among others, continued to accuse him of sensationalizing his duties. He was demoted on April 27, 1982.

In his 1983 book, Coroner, about his most celebrated cases, Noguchi returned to the mysterious death of Natalie Wood—indeed, he began the book with it. After acknowledging the crucial questions—“Wasn’t it strange that the two men on the yacht didn’t even know that she had left the boat? Hadn’t she spoken to them? Why had she slipped out to the stern of the yacht in the middle of the night, climbed down a ladder, and untied the dinghy? What was she doing? And where was she going? And why?” and also “When she first fell off the swimming step into the water, why didn’t she simply swim a few strokes and reboard the yacht by way of the step? It must have been only a few feet away from her. Even with the heavy jacket, she could have accomplished this effort easily”—he proceeded not to answer any of them. Instead, he spun a dramatic yarn about Wood’s clinging to the dinghy as she attempted to propel it to the beach by kicking her feet.

Through his attorney, Paul Ziffren, and friends, Wagner gave his story, saying that the cruise had been a happy one before ending in the freak accident of Wood’s death. Two years later, Walken spoke for the record. “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. Because the truth is, there is nothing more to it. It was an accident.” Other than that, the two have maintained silence about the incident. (Both declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Doubts about the accident theory have, in fact, never died down, especially in the tabloid press. The principal reason for that is the only other person on the boat that night: Dennis Davern, who claims he has always believed that something more sinister occurred. Davern, now 51, says that the account he gave to police investigators in the days after Wood’s death was incomplete, sanitized, and in some places downright false. Over the years he has offered parts of his story—for money—to various tabloids, and has occasionally appeared on television, most notoriously in February 1992, on Geraldo Rivera’s Now It Can Be Told, when he was filmed without his knowledge discussing an argument aboard Splendour and implying that he knew how Wood got into the water. In the early 1990s he visited New York publishers in an unsuccessful attempt to interest them in a book on the subject.

Despite the fact that Davern is not the most savory witness, he tells a compelling story, one that has been fairly consistent in its various public incarnations even as it has grown with damning details. Now, it seems, widespread interest in the case is about to ignite once again, as two new biographies of Wood are in the works (one by Gavin Lambert with the cooperation of Robert Wagner; another, Natasha: The Biography of Natalie Wood, by Suzanne Finstad, author of several true-crime books).

Recently, Vanity Fair spoke with Dennis Davern and also with Duane Rasure, the lead police investigator on the case. Rasure shared a copy of the police report, which at last gives us crucial details and testimony from all involved. Surprisingly, in almost all instances, the interviews with witnesses—waiters, hotel clerks, other yachtsmen, and, most notably, Christopher Walken, whose police interrogation is the only detailed account we have from him—tend to back up Davern’s story that Natalie Wood’s fatal fall was not simply an accident, as Robert Wagner has maintained, but the final act in a two-day drama of jealousy and rage, fueled by round-the-clock drinking.

It’s as if we always knew her, growing up in America, watching Natalie Wood live out her 43 years in darkened movie theaters across the country. Photoplay and Modern Screen were devoted to her in the 1950s: Wood in a boat-necked shirt, her hair freshly bobbed, feeding the porpoises at Marineland with Nick Adams, her co-star in Rebel Without a Cause; Wood being playfully spanked by handsome, blond Tab Hunter, whom Warner Bros. tried with little success to team romantically with her in The Burning Hills and The Girl He Left Behind.

Her youthful marriage to Robert Wagner, then a promising contract player, was catnip to the fan magazines. The envied couple were often seen nestled in an outsize red banquette at Jean Leon’s La Scala in Beverly Hills. Tom Wolfe described Wood’s “great big marvelous huge mothering brown eyes,” but she was really an American girl, struggling to grow up in film after film, from the doubting child who comes to believe in Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street to the rebellious teenager in Rebel Without a Cause to the yearning high-school girl destined for madness in Splendor in the Grass.

“She was right there at the apotheosis of the 50s,” a friend of Wood’s once said. After all, she hung out with both James Dean and Elvis Presley. (The two days she spent with the latter in November 1956 in Memphis were a big disappointment. “He can sing,” she later confided to her younger sister, Lana , now 54 years old and the head of Lana Wood Casting in Hollywood, “but he can’t do much else.”) She had been a child star for 13 years when, in the summer of 1956, she had her first date with Robert Wagner, known as “R.J.” to his friends. She was 18, he was 26. She was the sought-after veteran of 25 films and had just made the rare successful transition to adult actress; he was an aspiring actor at Twentieth Century Fox, the son of a well-to-do steel executive. He had grown up in a house overlooking the Bel-Air Country Cub, where he caddied for such stars as Clark Gable and Fred Astaire. His first real break came in 1952 when studio head Darryl F. Zanuck gave him a small role as a shell-shocked soldier in Walter Lang’s With a Song in My Heart. Susan Hayward, playing real-life music-hall entertainer Jane Froman, sings to Wagner’s tremulous soldier while tears run down his face. Thousands of fan letters poured in, auguring bigger roles to come. Two years later, however, he was stuck playing Prince Valiant in a pageboy wig and a padded body stocking complete with rubber calves. The $3 million CinemaScope epic did all right at the box office, but it was lethal to a budding career as a serious actor. Wagner later recalled wincingly that the Method-trained actors at the studio used to drop by the set to laugh at his ridiculous getup, and Dean Martin mistook him for Jane Wyman because of his wig.

At the same time, Wood was becoming a different kind of star. In 1955 she had played Judy in Rebel Without a Cause, which established her as a teen idol and won her an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress. (She lost to Jo Van Fleet in East of Eden .) While campaigning for the part, she was briefly hospitalized after a serious car accident with Dennis Hopper, then 18 years old and her co-star in the movie. When Wood was called a “juvenile delinquent” by the police, she was ecstatic and made sure Rebel’s 43-year-old director, Nicholas Ray—who had been skeptical because of her good-girl image—knew about it. It wasn’t long before the under-age actress fell into an affair with her director, meeting him secretly at the Chateau Marmont, just off Sunset Boulevard. Hopper remembered in Bernard Eisenschitz’s Nicholas Ray: An American Journey that he “got into terrible problems” with Ray, “because we were both fucking Natalie Wood. . . . Nick snitched on me. I was furious with him: the studio came down on me, and he came out of it as pure as snow.”

Wagner, on the other hand, cultivated older, established stars, such as Spencer Tracy, who became a mentor after the two worked together in Broken Lance (1954) and The Mountain (1956). Even though “Natalie was running around with people R.J. wouldn’t have in his house,” as a friend remembers, a romance ignited and became one of the most publicized in the history of Hollywood. Wagner shared his love of boats with Wood. In fact, the two consummated their relationship during a moonlit sail on Wagner’s boat My Lady —and, according to Lana Wood, continued to celebrate the anniversary every year.

They were married on December 28, 1957, in Scottsdale, Arizona. Los Angeles Times columnist Joyce Haber later described them as being “the most photographed, talked-about, envied couple since Wally Simpson and Edward VIII.” Many speculated that the marriage would boost Wagner’s career.

The couple spent much of their honeymoon on the water, first cruising the Florida Keys, where they met with a potential disaster at sea. Writing in Modern Screen in April 1958, gossip columnist Louella Parsons reported that

Mrs. Wagner got on the long distance phone to tell me, “We’re just now catching our breath. You’ve never seen anything like the storm that hit Florida just as we arrived to board the boat we’d chartered for a cruise.” . . . It was Bob on the telephone now. “The worst storm to hit the Florida coast in fifteen years blows up! . . . You’ll never believe what was happening to that boat as we tried to make our way back to port. It was pitching like a wild horse. Dishes and glasses were crashing all over the galley. . . . It was all but impossible for our skipper to see one wave ahead of us. I was so worried about Nat. It was an awful ordeal for her.”

After returning to Los Angeles, the newlyweds dropped anchor just off Catalina aboard My Lady. The small island, with its rich Hollywood history, would become a favorite escape. “I love being on the water and near the water,” Natalie would later say, “but not in the water.”

“Hollywood prepares you for life in front of the camera,” Lana Wood once observed, “but it doesn’t prepare you for private life.”

The writer Thomas Thompson, a close friend of Natalie’s who first met her when he was assigned to interview her for Life magazine, recalled that at the beginning of the marriage “Natalie was in emotional ruins.” She was insecure and suspicious of everyone, even of Wagner. Controlled by the studios and her ambitious Russian émigré stage mother, Maria Gurdin, who had pushed her into movies when she was only five, Wood suddenly realized that she had no idea who she was—she had spent her life taking on the roles of other people. “I was unable to make a decision of any kind. People had told me what to do all my life,” she later said.

Wood had terrible insomnia, lying awake at night trying to figure out why she was so unhappy. She began to rely on sleeping pills and finally told Wagner that she wanted to consult a psychiatrist. “For eight years she spent lunch hours every day—every day!—with her analyst, and she turned down important film roles because they would take her away from the couch,” Thompson observed.

Important roles nevertheless continued to come her way. Even the box-office disappointments of her two 1958 films, the hotly anticipated Marjorie Morningstar, based on the Herman Wouk best-seller, and Frank Sinatra’s Kings Go Forth, didn’t knock her off the A-list. Wagner, however, continued to have career troubles. Seven years earlier, he had been spoken of in the same breath with Tony Curtis and Rock Hudson, but Twentieth Century Fox was putting the boyishly handsome actor in such clinkers as Sail a Crooked Ship and Say One for Me.

“Here was Natalie, starring in a major movie like Splendor in the Grass, and here was R.J. doing dogs like Stopover Tokyo, ” one film director recalled. Wood attempted to resuscitate her husband’s career by appearing with him in the 1960 film All the Fine Young Cannibals —an overripe Tennessee Williams knockoff. “I was white trash, looking for money” is how Wood described her role in the film. “Bob was a trumpet player living with a black woman who was a singer. We all wore wigs.” The movie was an embarrassing flop. Wagner wouldn’t appear on-screen again for nearly two years, while Wood began filming one of her most important movies, William Inge’s Splendor in the Grass, opposite Warren Beatty .

With this movie Wood’s and Wagner’s real troubles began. “I do not know which came first,” Lana Wood said, “the end of her marriage or Warren Beatty.”

Splendor in the Grass, set in Kansas in the 1920s, was directed by the celebrated stage director Elia Kazan. Wood breaks your heart in the role of Deanie Loomis, who’s nearly destroyed in the struggle between her love for her high-school sweetheart, Bud, played with immense appeal by Beatty, and the puritanical tyranny of small-town America, embodied by her interfering mother, played by Audrey Christie. Under Kazan’s brilliant direction, Wood has an on-screen breakdown that is almost too painful to watch: Deanie, clad in a red dress, tries to drown herself in a reservoir. (For her work in the film, Wood would win her second Academy Award nomination.)

Beatty was making his film debut in the movie; he had been championed for the part by Inge, who had become enamored of the handsome actor during the 1959 Broadway run of his play A Loss of Roses, in which Beatty had played the lead. At first, Beatty and Wood did not get along, and there was concern that their love scenes were not generating sparks. Beatty was living with Joan Collins at the time, but at some point during filming, the passionate kissing on-camera began to catch fire. Kazan believed, as he later wrote, that “it was clear to Natalie . . . that Warren was bound for the top; this perception was an aphrodisiac.” One day Wagner arrived on the set and found Beatty’s arm wrapped around Wood’s waist while they were waiting for the lights to be set up. Beatty accused Wagner of keeping tabs on them. Wagner reacted with embarrassment and barely controlled rage. Kazan noticed the storm brewing, but he felt that if the budding affair between his two young actors helped their love scenes, he didn’t mind. The director regretted only the obvious pain the affair was causing Wagner. What made it even worse, according to Kazan’s autobiography, Elia Kazan: A Life, was that Wagner’s “sexual humiliation was public.”

Wagner finally walked out and went to stay on his boat at Newport Beach. His and Wood’s separation and subsequent divorce in 1963 shocked Hollywood. Elizabeth Taylor was said to have become so upset that she had to take to her bed. “Why does she need sedating?” asked Wood, who had a famously competitive relationship with Taylor. “It’s my marriage that just collapsed.”

To many observers, Wagner suffered the most. His career continued to decline, while Wood’s flourished. “It just didn’t seem fair,” wrote a friend of Wagner’s. “It must be admitted, he was probably jealous of her continued success. Natalie, however, had an enormous, single-minded ambition, and nothing was going to stop her.”

While her marriage was crumbling, Wood made some of the best films of her career— West Side Story in 1961 and Gypsy in 1962. To help prepare her for the role of the brainy burlesque queen Gypsy Rose Lee, Beatty took her to a strip club to watch two featured strippers: Fran Sinatra and Natalie Should. He also showed up on the set of Gypsy nearly every day.

The sea would play a dangerous and fateful role throughout Wood’s life. While filming Splendor in the Grass, the actress’s fear of the water came to Kazan’s attention. A few days before shooting the reservoir scene, Wood confided to the director that she had a deep-seated “terror of water, particularly dark water, and of being helpless in it.” Kazan, schooled in Stanislavskian method, remembered thinking how perfect that was for the scene. Wood asked him if it couldn’t be shot in a small studio tank, but the director refused. He explained that the reservoir was shallow and her feet would always touch bottom. She wasn’t reassured, but she did the scene and did it well. But back on dry land, Kazan remembered, Wood shivered with fear and then laughed hysterically with relief.

It was not the first time that Wood’s phobia had become an issue. When she was 11, in 1949, on the set of RKO’s The Green Promise, she was supposed to cross a bridge that was rigged to collapse once she reached the other side; however, somebody pulled the lever when she was halfway across, and she fell into the water below. “I don’t even remember them fishing me out,” Wood later recalled.

An even more harrowing incident occurred while filming The Star with Bette Davis in 1952. Ironically, it happened off Catalina, on a freezing January morning. The director, Stuart Heisler, wanted Wood to leap over the railing of Sterling Hayden’s private yacht. “Just jump,” Heisler told her. “There will be men in rowboats to pick you up.” When she hit the water she panicked and began screaming. Davis threatened to quit if they made Wood do the scene again. When they reshot it with a double, the stand-in became entangled in the kelp and nearly drowned. “After all that,” Wood said later, “they cut the scene from the movie.”

Four years after making Splendor in the Grass, Wood had yet another heart-stopping moment at sea, while filming a scene with Robert Redford in Santa Monica Bay for Robert Mulligan’s Inside Daisy Clover. A giant rogue wave suddenly reared up, separating a small boat containing Wood and Redford from the crew and technicians. Mulligan recalled that “there was no way we could get Natalie and Bob off the boat, and the lines to keep them in place were breaking right and left.” Redford thought the whole thing was a lark, but Wood was terrified.

With their careers going in opposite directions, who would ever have predicted that Wood and Wagner would be reunited, as they were in 1972. In the nine years between their divorce and remarriage, Wagner moved to Europe to try to change the course of his nearly moribund career. He had better luck there, landing an important cameo in Darryl Zanuck’s 1962 World War II epic, The Longest Day, and showing an unexpected gift for light comedy in Blake Edwards’s 1964 movie The Pink Panther; he also married his second wife, Marion Marshall Donen, who had recently been divorced from the director Stanley Donen.

“I grew up at last,” Wagner has said of the period, during which his good friend Paul Newman offered him the role of a lifetime: that of a weak rich man’s son who turns out to be the villain in the 1966 film Harper. “That’s the part that made me. For the first time, I got some damn good reviews,” he recalled. The whole course of Wagner’s career would soon change again, however: he would make his mark not in film but on television.

“In the sixties,” Wagner later said about the film business, “everybody was an antihero. There weren’t many parts for a guy like me.” Then Lew Wasserman, the president of MCA, called Wagner into his office and pulled out a copy of TV Guide. “This is where you belong!” he said. When the opportunity came for Wagner to play the debonair ex-con in the new ABC television series It Takes a Thief, he was ready. Premiering in 1968, the show became a hit, earning Wagner $10,000 per episode and giving him the role—that of “a small-screen version of Cary Grant”—for which he was perfectly suited.

Lana Wood noticed that her sister reacted with dismay when she learned of Wagner’s marriage to Donen; she was inconsolable when she heard that the couple was expecting a child. Wagner showed up at La Scala passing out cigars to celebrate the birth of his daughter Katharine in 1964; Natalie happened to be there that night, sitting in “their“ booth. When he passed by Wood’s table, “they looked at each other across years of melancholy,” Thomas Thompson later wrote.

After Beatty reportedly picked up the hatcheck girl at Chasen’s and left Wood alone and humiliated at the table (Suzanne Finstad, who says she has spoken to almost 400 people for her upcoming biography of Wood, calls this incident “unsubstantiated, recycled gossip”), Wood embarked on a string of paramours: Arthur Loew Jr. (heir to the theater chain); David Niven Jr.; the English actor Tom Courtenay; and Ladislav Blatnik, a Yugoslav playboy shoe magnate who, as a parlor trick, would eat Wood’s Baccarat crystal glasses. She was miserable. One afternoon in late 1966, just after Beatty stopped by, she swallowed a handful of sleeping pills. Fortunately she was found by her friend and secretary, Mart Crowley, later a playwright and the author of The Boys in the Band. Crowley saved her life by rushing her to Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Hollywood. “All I know is this,” Crowley later said. “Warren came by and they were talking. Then I heard raised voices and Warren left. Natalie went upstairs to her bedroom. That’s when she took the pills.”

But it wasn’t just Beatty or his ill-timed visit; it was an accumulation of sorrows. A journalist who had befriended Wagner had predicted that “Natalie Wood will end up the real loser.”

Then Richard Gregson, a charming English agent and producer, rescued her from all that. Their 1969 Russian Orthodox wedding was spectacular, held at the Holy Virgin Mary Cathedral in Los Angeles; Wood’s silk wedding dress had been designed by Edith Head. Her good friend Robert Redford was best man. However, the marriage was short-lived; the couple separated just months after the September 29, 1970, birth of their child, a girl they named Natasha (Natalie’s Russian name). She threw Gregson out of the house when she reportedly learned he was having an affair.

A few months earlier, Wagner and Marion Donen had filed for divorce. As work took him away from his family for longer periods, the marriage had deteriorated. Wagner briefly dated Tina Sinatra, even becoming engaged to her and hanging out at the Sinatra compound in Palm Springs. But once Wood had put Gregson out of her life, Wagner came calling. “Things happened fast,” Lana Wood observed. “They fell as hard, if not harder, than they had the first time. They were thrilled and confused.”

They chose the 1972 Academy Awards ceremony at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to re-emerge in public as a couple. As they stepped out of a limousine, their appearance caused pandemonium. Lana Wood recalled: “It was a reunion the whole world felt sentimental about.”

In spring 1972, Wood accompanied Wagner to London aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2 on a junket to promote a new television film he’d made with Bette Davis, Madame Sin. But the morning after the couple left New York Harbor for Southampton, a freak storm with 70-foot swells rose up and engulfed the ocean liner for four days. According to Warren G. Harris, author of Natalie and R.J., Wood and Wagner hid out in their cabin, fatalistically drinking champagne and eating caviar. When they emerged unharmed on the other side of the Atlantic, they decided to remarry.

They were married for the second time aboard Ramblin’ Rose, a borrowed yacht, on July 16, 1972. The yacht cruised along the California coast and stopped near Malibu at Paradise Cove. After letting the guests off the boat, the newlyweds made their blissful way to Catalina for their second honeymoon.

The history of Catalina is entwined with the history of Hollywood. Clark Gable filmed Mutiny on the Bounty in those island waters; Errol Flynn swashbuckled as Captain Blood off the Catalina coast. The pretty tourist town of Avalon, a one-square-mile village named for the mythical isle where King Arthur’s body was taken after his death, inspired the 1920 song “Avalon,” one of Al Jolson’s big hits. A film crew once imported a small herd of buffalo for a 1924 movie; their progeny—400 strong—still roam the remote, craggy hills high above the blue waters of the Pacific. Since the 1920s, Hollywood stars including Jean Harlow, John Barrymore, Douglas Fairbanks, Humphrey Bogart, and John Wayne have moored their yachts in Avalon’s sparkling harbor.

Throughout their second marriage, Wood and Wagner spent many weekends enjoying the pleasures of Catalina. “Our life started again—really beautifully—on that boat,” Wagner told a longtime friend. The waters of Catalina were not supposed to be the scene of a tragedy.

It is considered bad luck to change the name of a boat, but when Wagner and Wood bought Challenger in 1975, they nevertheless rechristened it Splendour, after a line in Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality.” Wood loved the poem, which, as Deanie, she had movingly read in Splendor in the Grass, but she always insisted the name wasn’t a reference to Kazan’s film, from which she wanted to distance herself because of the infidelity and jealousy that had erupted on the set. Those passions were safely in the past—or were they?

The couple hired the young man who had helped bring the boat from Florida to California to serve as their captain. Dennis Davern had been around boats since he was six years old. His first vessel was a rowboat his parents had bought him when his family lived in Margate City, New Jersey, a suburb of Atlantic City. Davern is still lean, lanky, and agile, though his long hair and beard have darkened. He says he has always loved the sense of freedom the sea gives him. “I was always the black sheep,” he says. “Everyone else stayed in New Jersey. I was the one to go.”

Davern remembers that “ Splendour was a big boat, with four staterooms and a full deck, and handrails all the way around. Even if you don’t like boats,” he says, “it would be like going on a cruise ship. You’d feel safe. . . . R.J. only paid 125 grand for it because it wasn’t a powerful boat. The original 16-cylinder diesel engine had been replaced with a pair of 8-cylinder diesels, not worth a whole lot, but Natalie wouldn’t have cared that the boat was underpowered. She was happy to go along at 10 miles an hour when you’re supposed to be going 30. If you went fast in the boat with her in it, you’d be pushing your luck.”

Wagner and Wood often included their skipper in festivities aboard Splendour. “With a lot of boat owners, you just try to stay out of the way. But as the years went by, we really got to know each other. We’d barbecue on the boat, and R.J. was the one who liked to put on the steaks, and Natalie would make the salad.”

Davern loved working for the Wagners, and was impressed that they brought their children on board for outings almost every other weekend. By 1974 the Wagners’ brood had grown to three: Katie, aged 10, from R.J.’s marriage to Marion; Natasha, Natalie’s 4-year-old daughter with Gregson; and Courtney, R.J. and Natalie’s daughter, born on March 9, 1974. The couple finally seemed to have all the happiness that had eluded them the first time around. “I’m glad we divorced,” Wood once told Thomas Thompson. “The intermission is what did it for us.” Wood was fond of quoting Mickey Ziffren (the wife of the Wagners’ lawyer Paul Ziffren), who had characterized the couple’s nearly 10-year separation as Seiten-sprung, the German word for switching partners while you’re dancing.

Wood and Wagner had switched not just partners but places as well. Wagner was at the apex of his career, portraying the suave Jonathan Hart in Hart to Hart, while Wood wasn’t working much. “[Natalie] had a past,” Lana Wood observed, “but [R.J.] had the present.” And if Wagner’s fame as a television star was a few notches below his wife’s status as a film icon, so be it: television had made Wagner rich. Besides income from his own successful shows, the Wagners’ production company would end up with almost half of the profits from the hit series Charlie’s Angels, as part of a deal he had forged with Aaron Spelling.

If television had rescued Wagner’s flagging career, he reasoned, it might do the same for his wife’s, so he started easing her into television, beginning with The Affair, in 1973, made when Natalie was pregnant with Courtney. Another television project that delighted her was playing Maggie the Cat opposite Wagner’s Brick in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, with Laurence Olivier as Big Daddy.

“When she had things to do,” Davern recalls, “she was excited. She’d get a lot of movie scripts, but nothing would ever come of them.”

By 1981, Wood had become a spokeswoman for RainTree’s line of beauty products (“Keep your age a secret with RainTree”). Her film career had been in trouble for a long time. After This Property Is Condemned in 1966, there would be only six more films, and a cameo in Robert Redford’s The Candidate in 1972. Her role in 1969’s hit Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice was seen as something of a comeback, but then followed such flops as the private-eye spoof Peeper, with Michael Caine, in 1975, and the disaster movie Meteor, with Sean Connery and Henry Fonda, in 1979.

Part of the problem was that Natalie was “Old Hollywood even though she wasn’t old,” Lana Wood said. She was a product of the studio system who came into her maturity when that system was going out of style.

It wasn’t just Wood’s and Wagner’s careers that underwent a reversal of fortune; their private lives followed suit. There was much speculation about the on-camera heat being generated between Wagner and the striking, brunette 39-year-old Stefanie Powers. Although Wood knew that Powers had, for a long time, been William Holden’s girlfriend, she was jealous. One day she appeared with Natasha and Courtney on the set of Hart to Hart while Wagner and Powers were filming a love scene. The two girls began to cry, and Wood comforted them by saying, “This is just the way Daddy makes a living.”

These were some of the pressures the couple took with them on weekend outings to Catalina. Davern recalls how he’d often “knock down a few bottles of wine with [Natalie and R.J.] Natalie was the real partyer. I’d tell her, ‘I’ll give you five quaaludes if you give me 10 Valiums,’ because at that time I liked taking a Valium in the morning and floating all day long. . . . So it would be, ‘Let’s eat these quaaludes, let’s chase them down with some wine.’ They had total trust in me, so they could do anything they wanted.”

The captain of Splendour was well aware of Wood’s fear of the water. “We could sit in Catalina, on the mooring cable, and R.J. and the kids would be swimming off the back of the boat, and me and Natalie would be on the bridge. . . . We were each other’s therapists sometimes. I remember her sitting there saying, ‘I think my biggest fear would be to drown.’ . . . I remember it was a sunny day when she said that.”

But it wasn’t a sunny day when Wood invited Christopher Walken to join her and Wagner on Splendour over the 1981 Thanksgiving weekend. It was gray and cold, and the sea was rough.

Walken, who had won an Academy Award for best supporting actor in Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter two years earlier, was co-starring with Wood in Brainstorm, a science-fiction thriller, which also featured Louise Fletcher, who had won the best-actress Oscar in 1976 for One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Cliff Robertson, who had won best actor in 1969 for Charly.

According to Davern, Wood became infatuated with Walken during the filming and openly flirted with him. “When they were in North Carolina together, rumors were going around about Chris Walken and Natalie, so R.J. went down there,” Davern explains. “He had a few days off from Hart to Hart . . . but he wasn’t about to make a fool of himself over this.” Lana Wood also believed her sister had an infatuation with Walken. In her 1984 book, Natalie, Lana wrote, “I don’t know if Natalie’s [love affair] with Chris was imaginary or real, though my strong suspicion is that it was all in her mind and that perhaps she was only wishing it to be so.” At least it seems that no romantic intrigue occurred on the set of Brainstorm, because Walken’s wife, Georgianne, had been present for the duration of the shoot.

Then, out of the blue, Davern got word that Walken was coming on the boat for a weekend cruise to Catalina. “I don’t think R.J. knew Christopher,” Davern says. “He was more the young movie star, where R.J. had been around for years.” It was a volatile situation, which may have been why Wood also invited Mart Crowley, who had been made a producer on Hart to Hart, and Peggy Griffin, her secretary. Both begged off, pleading too much work.

Davern didn’t like Walken from the moment he appeared on the dock at Marina del Rey. The weather was miserable. “The heaters were on in the boat. We were only doing it because of Christopher . . . who comes on board wearing a navy pea coat with the collar up. I don’t know this guy from Adam, and I guess I felt the way R.J. felt.”

They left around noon on Friday. Davern says he noticed that Wagner seemed put out by all the attention Wood was lavishing on their guest. “Christopher and Natalie are sitting in the salon together and giggling, and I’m looking at R.J. and thinking, He doesn’t look too happy. R.J. was getting annoyed, and plus, we’re drinking. . . . I was seeing R.J. getting mad. The boat just starts getting smaller. You can’t look for a whole lot of escape.”

Shortly after they left port, however, Walken got seasick and spent most of the rest of the crossing sleeping in his stateroom. When he emerged, the yacht was already in the harbor at Avalon. Since there were no moorings available, they had to anchor a quarter-mile off Avalon’s Casino Ballroom, built in 1929 by William Wrigley, the chewing-gum tycoon. Around five P.M., Wagner, Wood, and Walken went into town, while Davern stayed aboard to make dinner.

The trio shopped at a number of boutiques and then headed for El Galleon, a restaurant facing the harbor. They had a few beers and discussed how to get one of Avalon’s jewelers to lower his prices. Darkness was falling when they reboarded Splendour, where Davern was preparing a barbecue. Walken, still feeling ill, decided to skip dinner and returned to his stateroom to lie down.

Then, according to a December 10, 1981, interview Davern had with police (in the presence of two attorneys, Stephen Miller and Mark Beck, whom Wagner had hired), since it was “‘a grumpy sea’ . . . R.J. wanted to move the position of the boat, and Natalie said it wouldn’t do any good . . . [so] she said she would rather spend the night ashore.”

Wagner’s interview with police, on December 4, 1981, largely agreed with this story: “The sea was pretty rough. He [Wagner] recalled he did move the Splendour closer to shore to get out of the heavy sea. There had been some disagreement as to this move by Natalie and he told her to take Dennis [Davern], the captain, ashore and stay in a hotel for the night.”

Today, however, Davern tells a different story about what happened: “There was some kind of argument going on. Christopher went down to take a nap or something, and Natalie and R.J. started fighting. I thought, I don’t believe this! I don’t believe this fight is still going on. This was later in the afternoon. Natalie says to R.J., ‘You’re being so silly.’ It went back and forth and back and forth. Natalie finally says to R.J., ‘I’m going ashore,’ and she asks me, ‘Dennis, will you take me ashore?’” Wood wanted to leave, Davern says, because “the tension on the boat was unbearable.” She had had enough and wanted to go home. Concerned that the fighting was getting out of hand, Davern says, he knocked on Walken’s stateroom door and asked him to intervene. Walken refused, cautioning him, “Never get involved in an argument between a man and a wife.”

Walken’s main interview with police, which took place on December 3, 1981, in the actor’s room (No. 601) at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, corroborates Davern’s new version that an argument occurred between Wood and Wagner: “Being very ill he [Walken] returned to his bunk. He stated he felt he was aware of some kind of hubbub up above. There was no yelling. Approximately 20 minutes later he thought he heard the sound of an anchor chain. He then recalled Natalie coming to the door of his cabin and telling him, ‘He wants to cross during the night.’ He then recalled she left. He next remembered the captain contacting him and wanting him to come up to get involved. He stated he told the captain, ‘Never get involved in an argument between a man and a wife.’”

Davern took Wood ashore in Valiant (which Wagner had jokingly named after what he considered his worst film) and the two headed for El Galleon. There, according to Paul Reynolds, the manager of the restaurant, in his police interview of November 29, 1981, they “requested to use the telephone to see if they could locate rooms for the night. He [Reynolds] stated he asked the victim if she had a boat and she replied ‘no, is there a boat going back.’ He advised her that the next boat returning from the mainland would be at 10 a.m. the following morning. Mr. Reynolds then made a telephone call to the Pavilion Lodge [a nearby hotel in Avalon] and reserved two rooms for Ms. Wood. He further said Ms. Wood and this other man were sitting at the bar having a couple of drinks prior to leaving for the hotel.”

The Pavilion Lodge was not chosen for privacy—the rooms face an interior court off Avalon’s main street, right on the harbor—but it was one of the few hotels that had rooms available on such short notice. Ann Laughton, the night receptionist at the Pavilion Lodge, recalled for police in her November 29, 1981, interview that Wood and Davern arrived at 11:15 P.M. and registered for two rooms. “[Laughton] further recalled that during registration they had asked her for some ice and she had shone [ sic ] them how to get it from the ice machine. She further added that they both appeared very intoxicated.”

On November 29, 1981, in the first of his two interviews with police, at the sheriff’s station at Isthmus harbor, Davern told police that “all four of them spent the night on the boat.” The police, however, had prior knowledge that this wasn’t true. They confronted Davern with his lie, and the boat captain “stated before answering that he’d rather talk to ‘R.J.’ and possibly an attorney.” In his second interview, on December 10, in the presence of Wagner’s attorneys, Davern admitted he had spent the night with Wood, because, in the Dragnet prose of the police report, “whenever Ms. Wood, victim, went ashore, he was usually directed to go with her to act as her bodyguard.”

Davern now clarifies that he ended up staying in the room with Wood. “We just drank the wine and went to sleep,” he says. “We thought it was best for me to stay with her, for protection. She knew I wasn’t going to make any kind of play for her—she was comfortable with me.”

The police report confirms that Socorro Meza, an employee at the Pavilion Lodge, told investigators that Davern’s room “had the appearance of being unused.” Walken and Wagner spent the night on Splendour.

The next morning, according to Linda Winkler, a day clerk at the Pavilion Lodge, Wood “looked fine but seemed somewhat disoriented.” Winkler told police on November 30, 1981, that “during [their] conversation Ms. Wood had asked where she could catch boat transportation back to the mainland and [Winkler] had directed Ms. Wood to the proper location. Ms. Winkler further told investigators she’d been amazed at the fact that a movie star like Ms. Wood would be taking public transportation back to the mainland.”

Then Wood changed her mind. With middle age, she had become particularly self-conscious about her appearance. Though still beautiful, she had complained to Lana about the accumulating years: “I’m fighting every damn one.” Perhaps more important, she didn’t want to abandon Walken, who was still aboard Splendour, so she and Davern returned to the yacht.

Walken told police that “he was awakened the next morning by Natalie, and she made some remark about she was going to take the sea plane back and wanted to know if he was staying. He recalled making the statement to her, ‘I’m not in this.’”

So Wood went to work rustling up a big breakfast of huevos rancheros for everyone. “Everyone acted like nothing happened,” Davern recalls, “and everything was beautiful again.”

At around 11 A.M., R.J. took the boat up to Isthmus Cove, at the other end of the island. Out on the water, Walken told police, “Robert Wagner was trying to talk him into doing some fishing and setting up some fishing poles. He [Walken] recalled R.J. thanking him for smoothing everything over.”

After they arrived that afternoon in Isthmus Cove, Davern recalled, Wood sat in the main salon and read while he, Wagner, and Walken went to their staterooms to take naps. After Walken woke up, he and Wood went ashore in Valiant, settled into Doug’s Harbor Reef, and began drinking. Sometime later Wagner and Davern took the water taxi to shore and joined them.

Davern says now that when they arrived Walken and Wood “were out of it—giggling and laughing. Me and R.J. are pretty sober—we don’t drink around the clock.”

Michelle Mileski, a waitress at the restaurant, told police on November 29, 1981, that Wagner and Davern had preceded Walken and Wood at the bar. Then when Wagner made reservations for an early dinner, Wood had expressed dissatisfaction with the wine list, stating, “We could go shopping on the Splendour and get our own wine.” Davern remembers that he and Walken returned to Splendour for that purpose. Aboard Valiant, Davern says, he and Walken smoked a joint, so when they returned to the restaurant with some wine, he felt “right in tune with Christopher and Natalie—high as a kite.”

The party’s waitress, Tina Quinn, told police in a November 29, 1981, interview that “during this dinner party [the Wagner foursome] consumed the two bottles of wine and that [one of the men] had been drinking daiquiris, further she remembered that other parties in the bar had bought two bottles of champagne for the Wagner party. During the meal she said the victim did not eat much of her dinner and was doing a lot of the complaining about small things such as there was too much light on the table, the table was too big, the fish was not fresh, and it appeared to the witness that the victim was not in the best of moods. Ms. Quinn recalled an incident where she saw the victim throw a water glass to the floor. . . . As they were starting to leave she recalled Robert Wagner lifting a large dark colored jacket and she felt it was being used as a shield because the victim appeared to be stumbling slightly. She then recalled all of the Wagner party leaving together and it was her opinion they were not in the best of moods. She clarified this statement saying that throughout the evening the victim appeared to be in changing moods, sometimes laughing and sometimes solemn.”

Don Whiting, the restaurant manager, recalled for police, also on November 29, 1981, that “he thought at the time there was some possible problems between Robert Wagner and his wife, the victim. He remembered some glass was broken, possibly thrown. He was of the impression that Robert Wagner was a little bit irritated with his wife.”

Walken later explained away the broken-glass incident to police by saying, “It was my fault. I was making a toast while drinking. At the conclusion of this toast, I threw my glass to the floor as I always do. I remember Natalie, and I think everybody else, did the same.”

Whatever the reason, it wasn’t the first time Wood had broken a wineglass when angered or upset. According to Lana Wood, Natalie had crushed a crystal glass in her hand the day that Wagner had left the house after the demise of their first marriage. She re-created the gesture in the television drama The Affair in a scene in which Wagner’s character abandons her.

Davern recalls today that throughout dinner Wood “was definitely flirting with [Walken]. They were like all giggling and touching. She was excited by Christopher—here’s this good-looking guy.” Wood didn’t want to return to the boat after dinner, Davern says.

Both William Peterson, the shore-boat operator, and Kurt Craig, in the harbor-patrol office, told police that they watched the Wagner party board Valiant and motor back to their yacht. Craig later told police that as the four were descending the ramp to the dinghy “what he described as a scream [came] from the female. He thought she may have been drunk and was unhappy at something that happened at the restaurant.”

At his press conference Thomas Noguchi stated that, according to information he had obtained from police investigators, a “nonviolent argument” had occurred aboard the yacht just prior to Wood’s disappearance. This electrified the media.

To quell the ensuing rumors, Robert Wagner put out his version of the final hours. This is how it’s quoted in the 1986 hagiography Heart to Heart with Robert Wagner:

We reached the boat in a happy frame of mind after spending a few hours at the restaurant eating and drinking. During dinner, I got into a political debate with Walken and we continued it aboard the yacht. There was no fight, no anger. Just a lot of words thrown around like you hear in most political discussions such as “you don’t know what you are talking about!” Natalie sat there not saying much of anything and looking bored. She left us after about a half hour, and we sat there talking for almost another hour. Then I went to kiss her good night, and found her missing.

Wagner goes on to theorize about how Wood had gotten into the water:

It was only after I was told that she was dressed in a sleeping gown, heavy socks, and a parka that it dawned on me what had really occurred. Natalie obviously had trouble sleeping with that dinghy slamming up against the boat. It happened many, many times before, and I had always gone out and pulled the ropes tighter to keep the dinghy flush against the yacht. She probably skidded on one of the steps after untying the ropes. The steps are slick as ice because of the algae and seaweed that’s always clinging to them. After slipping on the steps, she hit her head against the boat. . . . I only hope she was unconscious when she hit the water.

Wagner’s two interviews with police were even less detailed. In the first, at 9:54 on the morning of the tragedy, he stated simply that “they were in the Salon when victim [Wood] went below to her bedroom. Shortly after they noticed she and the [ Valiant ] were missing.” Since Wagner “was in an emotional state,” the interview was terminated almost immediately. In the somewhat more detailed. December 4 interview, Wagner related only that “after they were aboard awhile, Natalie went down to bed and at this point in time, he recalled Chris Walken stepping out on deck for awhile. When Chris returned inside the salon, they continued talking. He estimated approximately 15 minutes passed. When he went to check on Natalie he noticed she was gone.”

When the police pressed Wagner “as to the discussion they had had prior to her going to bed,” he told them “it was about her being away from home and the kids so much. . . . He missed her being around.”

When questioned about the broken glass which police investigators had found in the main salon of Splendour in their search of the boat that began at 12:45 P.M. the day of the tragedy, Wagner explained that “it was probably from the rough seas.”

Davern, in his December 10 police interview, was a bit more forthcoming, but not much: “He recalled that RJ and Natalie got into a discussion about her being gone and how RJ missed her. During the discussion Chris Walken entered into it, supporting Natalie’s views. He felt RJ was getting upset over this and Chris Walken getting up and going outside around this time. Natalie went to the master stateroom to go to bed. Chris Walken came back into the main salon and he was going to bed. Here this was normal procedure for Natalie. In the evening she would just leave, prepare herself for bed, and usually return after ten or fifteen minutes to say goodnight. . . After some time past [ sic ], he stated, RJ went to see where Natalie was. When they noticed she was gone, about the same time they noticed the [ Valiant ] was gone.”

Today, however, Davern tells a different and darker story: Back on board, he says, he offered to make tea for everyone. “While the tea is brewing, the wine is flowing. We opened another bottle [probably Wood’s favorite, Pouilly-Fuissé]. Then Natalie lit her beeswax candles. R.J. was drinking scotch by then, and I joined him. So we’re sitting there, and Chris and Natalie are giggling and carrying on, the same as before, totally forgetting that me and R.J. are there. I’m saying to myself, Oh my God, this is getting to be too much right now.

“All of a sudden,” Davern says, “R.J. grabbed a bottle of wine and smashes it right on the table in front of them. Glass goes flying all over.

“‘Jesus Christ,’ R.J. says to Christopher, ‘what are you trying to do, fuck my wife?’

“Christopher got up in two or three seconds and headed right out the door. Now Natalie says, ‘I’m not standing for this a minute longer!’ She goes down to her stateroom and slams her door. Christopher goes right down to his stateroom. Now I’m left alone with R.J.

“I say, ‘R.J., let’s just calm down.’ We stayed up there for a little while, then R.J. says, ‘I’m going to go down there and see Natalie.’”

Davern says that as he remained on the bridge, located right over the Wagners’ stateroom, he could hear the couple “fighting like crazy. . . . I’d never in a million years seen them fight like that before. I just couldn’t believe it. . . . You know, stuff getting thrown around.” It was, according to Davern, a ferocious argument fueled by drink—“so hot and heavy that it got carried out into the cockpit” at the rear of the yacht. Davern says he next heard “the dinghy being untied—you can hear the ropes, the bowline being tugged on.”

And then, Davern says, there was silence. It seemed like a long time to him before Wagner, “tousled, sweating profusely, as if he had been in a terrible fight, an ordeal of some kind,” came back up to the bridge, where the two men emptied another bottle of wine.

Davern says that it was about 11:30 when Wagner returned. “We were up there drinking until 1:30 in the morning. Then R.J. said, ‘I’d better go back down and check on Natalie.’”

After a few minutes, Wagner appeared and told the captain, “She’s gone.”

“She’s gone? Where the hell is she?”

“I don’t know.”

Davern decided to go look for her. “I thought maybe she went into my stateroom, feeling she could confide in me. So I went up and she’s not there. So I looked in the empty stateroom—nothing. I look in Christopher’s stateroom. He’s in the top bunk and he’s asleep. I looked in his bathroom, and thank God she’s not in Christopher’s room. I knew that wouldn’t happen, because there’s too much rage going on. So I go back up and say, ‘She’s not down below.’”

Davern walked out on deck to look for her, and that’s when he noticed that Valiant was gone.

Davern was baffled. He believes that if Wood had decided to return to shore at night he would certainly have been asked to go with her. “If the stars aren’t out, it’s total darkness. There’s no place to go. Darkness all around. I wouldn’t go out on [ Valiant ] at night.”

Davern says he then told Wagner that he was going to turn on Splendour’s floodlights in order to look for her, but Wagner told him not to: “Dennis, don’t turn that on.” Davern then offered to fire up the yacht’s engines and cruise around looking for Wood. According to Davern, Wagner refused.

“Don’t do that. Let’s think about this. We don’t want to do anything, Dennis, because we don’t want to alert all these people,” Davern says Wagner told him.

With the police report, we at last have Christopher Walken’s description of the crucial hours preceding the tragedy. It is a story closer to Davern’s than to Wagner’s. In the first of his two interviews, at 10 on the morning of the tragedy, he told police, “After they were aboard the boat he and Robert Wagner got into a small beef. He left the cabin and went outside on deck for a few minutes, when he returned victim [Wood] was sitting there and she seemed to be disturbed. He recalled she then went to her room and he thought she had gone to bed. He next remembered the captain dennis make [ sic ] a remark ‘the dinghy is gone.’”

Walken’s more detailed, December 3 interview produced this version:

They were in the salon talking; he [Walken] stated they had all been drinking and they had one of those conversation [ sic ] going were [ sic ]—and he used the reference—“you put all your cards on the table.” RJ was making statements and complaining that she was away from home too much. She was away from the kids, it was hurting their home life. Mr. Walken stated he also got involved with discussion supporting the victim’s views—she was an actress, she was an important person, this was her life. He suddenly realized he was violating his own view about getting involved in an argument between a man and a wife. He stepped outside for some air and when he returned, everybody was apologizing, particularly Robert Wagner and everything seemed fine.

Duane Rasure is a big man—six feet three—who dresses like a cowboy now that he’s in retirement from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, Homicide Bureau. He and his wife, Joy, live in a remote town in Arizona called Eagar. Rasure still wears a belt buckle that proudly displays the number 187, the number of the section of California’s penal code for murder. When he got the call to investigate the Wood drowning, he had been a homicide detective for 11 years. He and his partner had helped break the case of the Hillside Strangler in the late 70s.

“They called me about 8:30 in the morning. They told me I got the case of Natalie Wood drowning in Catalina, which surprised me. The news threw my wife into shock, and from then on it was a matter of getting dressed, heading for the heliport, where I was transported to Catalina to do my investigation.”

Twenty minutes after Rasure’s arrival, a helicopter brought Wagner and Walken to the sheriff’s office on the island. “I introduced myself and my partner [Roy Hamilton] to Wagner, and told him what we were going to do. I could see he’s at a loss. He’s just in trouble. He’s hurting. It took just a short time to get a general idea of what had happened. It seemed accidental from the first, probably because of the way I got the information—the way it was presented: ‘Someone fell overboard and drowned.’ Nothing in the world would make us think at the time that there might have been something suspicious.”

Rasure would soon feel the pressure of the investigation. He started getting calls from old friends who knew he’d been assigned to the case. Quite a few tough homicide detectives were touched by Wood’s death. “They would call me up,” Rasure recalls, “and say, ‘Duane, tell me what happened. I loved that girl. I watched her grow up.’”

A week after the drowning, at one in the afternoon on December 4, Rasure visited Wagner’s home in Beverly Hills in order to question the actor a second time. “The first time I interviewed him he was just as cooperative as could be,” Rasure recalls. “But I didn’t get enough information at the heliport. So I went to interview him again, and his attorney says, ‘I don’t think so. I think you have enough.’

“At that time, we had a sheriff who was a very powerful man here,” Rasure explains. “We went to lunch, and I told him I was having this little handicap, this little problem with this attorney, and he says, ‘Oh.’ I had my appointment [with R.J.] the following day.”

Rasure arrived and was taken upstairs. Wagner was in bed during the entire interview, with his lawyer Paul Ziffren in the room. “I let him tell me what happened, going into more detail.” Once again, Rasure was satisfied. Roy Hamilton would tell the Los Angeles Times that “we talked to Wagner and Walken and there was no indication that there was any argument.” (This is rather astonishing, considering the police interviews with Walken.)

Despite the fact that there were obvious inconsistencies in the testimony of the three principal witnesses, the police investigation was closed on December 11, less than two weeks after the tragedy, with the conclusion of “accidental drowning.” Rasure, who subscribes to the theory that Wood slipped while trying to retie the dinghy, says, however, that he doesn’t really know for sure what happened to the actress.

“I can’t tell you exactly how she got in the water,” he says today.

As a witness, Dennis Davern presents many problems. The first is why he didn’t initially tell police the version he tells today, rather than letting it out piecemeal to journalists and tabloids over the almost 20 years that followed.

Davern claims that in the days after the tragedy he became a virtual prisoner in Wagner’s Beverly Hills home: at first, he and R.J. would wake around 10 each morning and “cry on each other’s shoulders, with a scotch glass in one hand and an arm around each other.” After several weeks, however, it slowly dawned on Davern, he says, that it would be very difficult to leave. He had a girlfriend he wanted to visit, and he began to wonder when and how he could go see her. She had already come to the house and had been rebuffed, he alleges. “When the alarm system kicked in at night, you couldn’t even open your door. It was like being in a vault. The first night I was there, I wanted to go downstairs to watch television, but I couldn’t get out. . . . There was no phone in the room. I couldn’t walk out the front door—somebody was always there, usually R.J.’s bodyguard. I felt really closed in.”

“In the daytime,” Davern says, “I would go downstairs and the staff would say, ‘Let me make you some drinks, Dennis.’ I’d go to the bar, pour a scotch, and R.J. would be up in his bedroom. It was like this for three months.”

“When I look back on it,” Davern now says, “I was a pure idiot. I had turned into a real drunk. I felt that I was a part of R.J., that he was going to make sure that Dennis was O.K.”

Davern says that Wagner went as far as to bring him to his own psychotherapy sessions. “I was having dreams like crazy. I’d wake up with some weird dreams. And R.J. said, ‘Dennis, I’m having bad dreams, too.’ So R.J. and I would go to his shrink together. We would sit down, sometimes in the same session, sometimes alone.”

On December 2, 1981, Wood was buried in Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery while a balalaika played softly under the warm afternoon sun. Robert Wagner plucked gardenias from Natalie’s casket, handing one each to Wood’s mother, to her sisters, and to her daughters. Then he bent down and kissed the gold-trimmed white coffin.

After the funeral, Davern says, reporters began tailing him, trying to get his story by posing as potential boat buyers or by luring him with beautiful women. He claims one tabloid offered him $200,000. When Davern told Wagner about the offer, Davern recalls, he cautioned him, “Dennis, they’re never going to pay you.” He further warned Davern that the F.B.I. would be asking him questions, and Natalie’s fans would be after him. “So I was cut off from everybody. . . .They said they were protecting me.”

Wagner got Davern into the Screen Actors Guild, Davern says, and although Davern had never acted before in his life, he started getting small roles on commercials and on Hart to Hart. “He [Wagner] used to give me checks,” Davern recalls, “a thousand, two thousand. My friends said it was hush money and that R.J. wouldn’t want anything to do with me after Splendour was gone. I used to tell them that R.J. wasn’t like that, that he was a real friend to me.”

Davern eventually decided to get his yacht broker’s license and live on the boat while he tried to sell it for R.J. It was his way, he felt at the time, to escape finally from R.J.’s protective scrutiny. “I took the boat somewhere where nobody would know it. I had a friend up in Oxnard who had a house with a dock in the back. So I took the Splendour up there. But nobody wanted anything to do with this yacht. It had become a bastard boat.” Wagner ended up donating it to the Sea Scouts, a youth boating club.

Once Splendour and Wagner were out of his life, Davern made his way back to South Florida. In the intervening years, the former sea captain has resurfaced periodically to try to tell his version of what happened that night. He has not been his own best advocate, holding back information and implying that he knows more than he’s saying. He sold part of his story to the Globe (“World Exclusive, NATALIE WOOD, the Shocking Truth About Her Death”), revealing that an argument occurred with Walken in the salon, but not revealing the alleged details and severity of the subsequent argument between Wagner and Wood in their stateroom.

There was also a disastrous appearance on Geraldo Rivera’s Now It Can Be Told in 1992, 10 years after the drowning, in which Rasure and Davern were asked to give their account of what happened that night for a “jury” comprising Raoul Felder and two other trial lawyers. By now Davern was writing a book about his experiences, and he arrived at the television studio with his co-author, a longtime friend named Margaret “Marti” Rulli. But he found the interview hard going, and he interrupted it several times so he could confer with Rulli off-camera. Then Davern was prompted, “They were yelling and screaming at each other to get off the boat . . . ” He responded, “Oh God, I don’t know if I can tell them that or not.” Rulli, exasperated, replied, “Ten years of this, Dennis! This needs to be cleared up! We have to say how she got in the water, Den.” But Rulli changed her mind—or perhaps just realized how stubborn Davern could be—and she said, “Don’t you tell them how she got into the water. . . . We put that in the book and we’ll make billions from it.”

Without their knowledge, Davern and Rulli were being filmed in their unguarded moments “off-camera,” and that’s what was televised on Now It Can Be Told. Rivera then essentially dismissed Davern’s testimony as compromised, but asked his panel of lawyers to comment anyway. All three agreed: the important fact was that Davern modified his police testimony, which almost always warrants a new investigation. Their unanimous verdict: reopen the case.

After the taping, Wagner sent Davern a letter warning him not to discuss the matter further.

Davern and Rulli also pounded the sidewalks trying to sell their manuscript to New York publishers. Davern says, “We went up to this publishing house and they said, ‘Who’s your agent?’ They must have thought we were total jerks! Nothing ever came of it. But it’s a good thing it never worked out—I never even told Marti the whole story.”

One former book editor, who met with the two, remembers being “chilled and intrigued by their tale, but we didn’t see how they could stretch it out into a full-length book. Also, we wondered where was the backup for his story. It was basically his word against Wagner’s.”

In Coroner, Noguchi admitted he had trouble with Wagner’s theory that Wood was bothered by the noise of the dinghy striking the side of the boat and slipped into the water while trying to retie it. “I found that theory plausible,” wrote Noguchi, “particularly because it explained her nightgown-and-socks apparel. And yet there was a possible flaw. The dinghy was rubber, and, according to Paul Miller, our expert who owned a similar boat [which by another curious coincidence in the case was moored to the same buoy, in front of Splendour, the night Wood died], a rubber dinghy makes little or no noise when it strikes a yacht.” (But, Noguchi allowed, “silence is relative. . . . Other sailors say that the noise might be amplified to an annoying degree.”)

In addition, Noguchi wrote, “forensic evidence, such as the fingernail scratches on the side of the dinghy, the brush-type abrasion on her cheek, and the untouched algae on the swim step, seemed to indicate that she was trying to board the dinghy, not just adjust its rope, when the accident happened.”

In the end, Noguchi, like Rasure, is not really sure how and why Wood ended up in the water. Perhaps Noguchi knows more than he is telling, thanks to his unreleased “psychological autopsy.” In a brief phone interview, he claims the document could be found with both the police report and the autopsy report. Scott Carrier, the information officer at the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office, says, “I have no idea where that report would be. Everything that was in the Natalie Wood file was sent to you. We have no additional reports.”

Davern says he has stopped trying to make money off his tale. He claims he recently turned down a $50,000 offer from a tabloid, although he still hopes the book he began writing many years ago about his life with the Wagners might one day be published. “I think she deserves an explanation for her death,” he says. He still has dreams about being aboard Splendour. He’s married now and raising three young children on a quiet street in a small Florida town, where he paints and restores boats. He named his first child Natasha.

Photos: Natalie Wood Through the Years

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Owner of ‘Splendour’, the Yacht Once Owned by Hollywood Stars Natalie Wood and her husband Robert Wagner, Becomes Instant Celebrity

The Honolulu resident, who has had a mooring permit in the a small boat harbor in Honolulu, is the owner of the Splendour , a yacht once owned by Hollywood stars Natalie Wood and her husband Robert Wagner.

The yacht, which will soon be inspected by Los Angeles investigators, may be a key part of the investigation reopened yesterday into the 1981 drowning death of Wood.

Reached by phone today, his wife said a number of media outlets are asking for interviews.

The Los Angeles Police Department said today in a press conference that using new DNA technology, investigators will examine the boat that Wood, Wagner and their friend Christopher Walken were on the night the actress died 30 years ago. They have not disclosed what they expect to find.

The boat captain Dennis Davern, who was with the trio the night Wood fell off the boat and drown, alleges that Wagner is responsible for Wood’s death and that he lied for Wagner in the past as a part of a cover up.

This comes as 48 Hour Mysteries and Vanity Fair magazine are about to release a special investigative report on the star’s demise.

48 Hours Presents Vanity Fair: Hollywood Scandal airs Saturday, Nov. 19 at 10 p.m. ET/PT on CBS, the network’s web site said.

Police so far maintain that Wagner is not a target of the investigation.

However, Wood’s sister also claims Wagner is responsible for the beloved star’s death.

She told TMZ  that Wagner  “left her to drown” and told the captain to ‘Leave her there, teach her a lesson.”

The captain said publicly today that he was prevented by Wagner from calling the U.S. Coast Guard for four hours.

Reports are that Wood, Wagner and Walken were drinking heavily that night, and Wood and Wagner had a volatile fight over whether Walken wanted to sleep with her. The captain claims to have turned up his music so he would not have to hear them argue.

The question police have to answer now is whether Wood fell, or slipped trying to get off the boat into a smaller dingy, or was pushed into the water while they were sailing off of Catalina Island.

Marti Rulli, who authored “ Goodbye Natalie, Goodbye Splendour” in September 2009 could not be reached for comment, but her investigation – and the other new publicity surrounding her death – may have contributed to police reopening the case.

Wagner has not made a statement about the LA police department’s decision.

A source close to the Wagner family told Hawaii Reporter that Wagner has been cooperating with the police and they don’t believe the captain’s story is credible.

A statement released from Wagner’s publicist is similar: “We trust they will evaluate whether any new information relating to the death of Natalie Wood Wagner is valid, and that it comes from a credible source or sources other than those simply trying to profit from the 30-year anniversary of her tragic death.”

Wood, who was nominated three times for Oscars for her roles in West Side Story and Rebel with out a Cause , also starred  as a child in such films as the Christmas classic Miracle On 34th Street and The Ghost And Mrs. Muir .

Meanwhile when the Los Angeles police will arrive in Honolulu is part of the mystery – at least for now.

Honolulu Police Department has not been contacted so far by Los Angeles authorities to aid in the investigation, according to Caroline Sluyter, spokesperson for HPD.

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The Mystery Surrounding Natalie Wood's Death

It soon emerged that Wood had spent Thanksgiving weekend aboard her yacht, Splendour, with her husband, actor Robert Wagner , her Brainstorm co-star, Christopher Walken , and the ship's young captain, Dennis Davern, before an accident of some sort left her lifeless in the water.

On November 30, Thomas Noguchi, chief medical examiner in the L.A. County Coroner's Office, announced his determination of an "accidental drowning." He noted the "superficial" bruises on Wood's body, likely from falling in the water, and the scratch marks on the yacht's dinghy, Prince Valiant, as evidence of her attempts to climb on board before succumbing to exhaustion.

Two days later, Hollywood mourned Wood's passing at a star-studded funeral, marked by a teary Wagner kissing her coffin, and the investigation was formally closed on December 11.

READ MORE: Inside Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner's Tumultuous Relationship

Associates raised questions as recollections changed

Although an accidental drowning seemed fully plausible, nagging questions lingered for those paying attention.

Noguchi himself raised some of those questions in his 1983 book, Coroner . Why, he wondered, did Wood slip out to the yacht's stern in the middle of the night and untie the dinghy? Where was she going? And why did it take so long for the men aboard to realize she was gone?

Wood's sister Lana, who followed by publishing Natalie: A Memoir by Her Sister (1984), was also puzzled by the supposed chain of events. How was it possible that Wood, with her long-known fear of "dark water," would venture out into those very environs, alone, on a starless night?

Elaborating on things in the 1986 book Heart to Heart with Robert Wagner , the actor described how he and Walken were engaged in a "political debate" for much of the evening, prompting his bored wife to check out of the discussion and head to bed. He theorized that she was unable to sleep with the dinghy banging against the yacht and fell and hit her head while attempting to tighten the line.

However, his recollection of impassioned discussions differed from an original description to police, in which he admitted to arguing with Wood about her extended time away from the family. It was just one of the many inconsistencies that surfaced as accounts of the night's events evolved over the years.

The ship’s captain came forth with his version of events

Still, with Wagner sticking to his general version and Walken saying next to nothing, the case likely would have lain dormant if it weren't for the efforts of Davern. After years of trying to get publishers and tabloids to bite on the story, he began leaking more revealing details to the mainstream press.

In a March 2000 story for Vanity Fair , the captain divulged that Wood and Walken had been flirting throughout the weekend and that things turned nasty after the foursome returned to Splendour after an evening spent drinking on the island. According to Davern, Wagner at one point smashed a wine bottle on the table and yelled at Walken, "What are you trying to do, f**k my wife?"

Wood stormed off and slammed the door of her room, with Wagner eventually heading down to confront her, setting off what Davern recalled as an epic fight. He claimed to have heard the dinghy being untied before Wagner returned, "tousled" and "sweating profusely."

With Walken in bed for the night, the two remaining men stayed up for more drinks, before Wagner, at around 1:30 a.m., said he would check on his wife. He returned with the news that he couldn't find her, prompting Davern to conduct his own search.

At that point, the captain recalled, Wagner rejected his suggestions to turn on the floodlights and look for Wood in the water. "We don't want to do anything, Dennis, because we don't want to alert all these people," the actor allegedly said, before they finally radioed for help.

Wagner revisited the case one more time in his 2008 memoir, Pieces of My Heart . "There are only two possibilities – either she was trying to get away from the argument or she was trying to tie the dinghy," he wrote. "But the bottom line is that nobody knows exactly what happened."

The case was reopened in 2011 and later reclassified as ‘suspicious'

In 2009, Davern finally published his long-gestating tell-all, Goodbye Natalie, Goodbye Splendour . Two years later, he was among the 700-plus people who signed a petition over the flawed investigation into Wood's death, prompting the L.A. County Sheriff's Department to reopen the case in November.

The following summer, the L.A. County coroner added emphasis to the newfound urgency by changing the cause of death to "drowning and other undetermined factors," citing a closer examination of bruises that suggested Wood was assaulted.

Yet another wrinkle emerged in February 2018, when the sheriff's department reclassified the death as "suspicious" and named Wagner "a person of interest" following interviews with former neighbors and fellow boaters.

At almost 90 years old, Wagner was no longer interested in talking to the police about his wife’s death. Still, it was clear that other people were, leaving open the possibility of finding some real answers after four decades of question marks.

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40 years later, the mystery over Natalie Wood’s death endures

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Forty years ago, actress Natalie Wood drowned off the coast of Catalina Island.

Authorities classified her death as an accident, concluding the 43-year-old star of “West Side Story,” who couldn’t swim, had been drinking the night before she was found floating face-down in the ocean waters.

Her death has been a Hollywood mystery, the topic of tabloid speculation, TV specials and books that explored whether she was the victim of a homicide.

The theory gained dramatic interest a decade ago.

In 2011, 30 years after Wood’s death, Los Angeles County sheriff’s officials reopened the investigation . Then, in 2013, county coroner’s officials changed Wood’s cause of death from “accidental drowning” to “drowning and other undetermined factors.” The new coroner’s report cited fresh bruises on the actress’ arms and knee, along with a scratch on her neck and a scrape on her forehead, as evidence that she might have been assaulted before she drowned.

The new report also noted “conflicting statements” about when Wood disappeared and whether she had argued with her husband, actor Robert Wagner, who — along with Christopher Walken, her co-star in the film “Brainstorm” — were aboard the 60-foot yacht where she was last seen alive on Nov. 28, 1981.

Hours before her death, authorities said, the three actors had had dinner at Doug’s Harbor Reef restaurant in Two Harbors and then returned to the yacht, called the Splendour, where they drank and an argument ensued between Walken and Wagner. According to the new report, Wood went missing about midnight, and an analysis of her stomach contents placed her death around that time. The report said Wagner placed a radio call to report her missing at 1:30 a.m.

PHOTOS: Natalie Wood |1938-1981

Roger Smith, the L.A. County rescue boat captain who helped pull Wood’s body from the water, said he did not receive a call to look for her until after 5 a.m.

The original investigators thought Wood’s body was bruised when she fell off the yacht and struggled to pull herself from the water into a rubber dinghy, whose side bore scratch marks that seemed consistent with that theory. But in the 2013 report, coroner’s investigators noted that nail clippings were not taken from Wood’s body to determine whether she had made the scratch marks, and the dinghy was no longer available to be examined. The coroner thinks Wood died soon after entering the water.

Detectives said more than 100 people contacted authorities after the investigation was reopened. But it became clear that the new probe didn’t provide a big break in the case. Some detectives claimed Wagner knew more than he let on about Wood’s death, an allegation the actor’s attorney denied.

No charges were ever filed, and the department has said it is not sure whether a crime occurred.

40 years ago, Mystery endures >> https://t.co/CB3X5dKmQz pic.twitter.com/3flidFGwkx — Shelby Grad (@shelbygrad) November 30, 2021

“Our biggest challenge is time,” Lt. John Corina of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s Homicide Bureau said in 2018. “Many witnesses have passed away, who were on boats nearby. The original investigator has passed away. We’re reaching out one more time to see if people will come forward with information.”

Corina died in 2019.

This article was compiled from The Times archives. Here is a breakdown of Times coverage of the Wood case:

Robert Wagner’s action after Natalie Wood’s death ‘doesn’t make any sense,’ detective says

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s investigators say they’re closer to understanding exactly how actress Natalie Wood died while boating off Catalina Island nearly four decades ago, but say they would still like to hear from her husband, Robert Wagner.

Feb. 5, 2018

L.A. County coroner changes Natalie Wood’s cause of death

Jan. 14, 2013

Entertainment & Arts

Authorities still want to interview Wagner in reopened Wood probe

Jan. 17, 2013

Detective’s comments ignite new interest in Natalie Wood’s mysterious drowning

The mysterious death of Natalie Wood off Catalina Island has sparked more than three decades of speculation about whether it was an accident or murder.

Feb. 1, 2018

How The Times covered Natalie Wood’s mysterious death in 1981

The mystery surrounding the 1981 death of actress Natalie Wood has long troubled law enforcement officials while fascinating the public.

Detectives running out of time in Natalie Wood mystery

Robert Wagner initially said Natalie Wood must have drowned while trying to leave their yacht in a small inflatable boat.

Feb. 6, 2018

Mystery of the reopened Natalie Wood case

Nov. 19, 2011

Review: Natalie Wood’s death is still big business. In HBO’s new doc, her family fights back

In HBO documentary “Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind,” the star’s daughter Natasha Gregson Wagner offers a personal counterpoint to true crime gossip.

May 5, 2020

Intimate portraits piece together the puzzle of Natalie Wood, the person and mother

Natalie Wood’s daughter, actress Natasha Gregson Wagner, has written a memoir of life with the legend and produced an HBO documentary about her career.

Violence, secret affairs afflicted Natalie Wood’s life and death, sister says in book

In ‘Little Sister,’ Natalie Wood’s sibling Lana shares research on Natalie’s drowning, allegations about Kirk Douglas and Sydney Pollack and more.

Nov. 9, 2021

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March 18, 2024

Woman, 31, found dead on the sand in Manhattan Beach

Jan. 27, 2024

A rising star at celebrity trials like O.J. Simpson’s. Then a quiet, mysterious death

Jan. 12, 2024

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What Really Happened to Natalie Wood?

The Hollywood star's death was declared accidental decades ago—but now, investigators aren't so sure.

We originally published the following investigation of Wood's death in 2018.

On a cool November day 37 years ago, four adults went for a cruise off the southwest coast of Los Angeles aboard Splendour , a 55-foot yacht. Three of those adults would come safely back to shore. The fourth would never see home again. She’d never work again or see her children reach adulthood. She was discovered floating in the water in a flannel nightgown, socks, and a down jacket the next morning.

In this story, the unlucky adult was also the most famous adult, movie star Natalie Wood , who was 43 at the time. She had been a beloved child actress, first capturing national attention in the 1947 Christmas classic Miracle on 34th Street— she played the skeptical, precocious Susan Walker—and then as a beautiful ingenue in such films as the 1961 musical West Side Story , in which she played a graceful Maria. By the age of 25, she had been nominated for three Academy Awards for Best Actress, for her leading roles in Rebel Without a Cause, Splendor in the Grass , and Love With a Proper Stranger.

But perhaps because of her tragic end, when you hear the name “Natalie Wood” today, you don’t think first of her storied career. To wit: There are 38 million Google results for the search term “Natalie Wood death.” While the circumstances surrounding her death remain murky and controversial, we can agree that in dying so young, and so mysteriously, Wood’s talent was denied a proper legacy.

In 1981, Natalie’s death was classified as an accident and “probable drowning in ocean.” Prominent Los Angeles coroner Thomas Noguchi cited in his report “numerous bruises to arms and legs” that were “superficial and probably sustained at the time of drowning” and wrote, “No other trauma noted and foul play is not suspected at this time.”

The investigator’s report attached to Noguchi’s document said that Wood and a small party that included her husband, Robert Wagner, had left the Splendour for a restaurant dinner on Catalina Island. At about 10 p.m., the “intoxicated” group returned to the yacht, using its dinghy, Valiant . Robert Wagner told the investigators that Natalie retired for the night in the couple’s cabin at about 10:45, but after talking for a while longer with their guest, Natalie’s co-star at the time Christopher Walken, Wagner went to join her in the cabin, only to find her missing.

Wagner and the others soon discovered the dinghy was also missing, and they “immediately” radioed for help. Harbor Patrol, private searchers, and eventually the Coast Guard all combed the water and island coastline, and a Sheriff’s Department helicopter eventually spotted Natalie’s floating body. She was pronounced dead at 7:44 a.m. on November 29th.

Wood’s funeral, held on December 3rd, showed a devastated, weeping Wagner, surrounded by friends, family, and the cream of the entertainment world: Laurence Olivier, Frank Sinatra, Gregory Peck, and Rock Hudson.

Instead of finality, Wood’s death only seemed to provoke questions , and three decades later, in 2011, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department reopened the investigation . And at a press conference in February of 2018, Captain Christopher Bergner of the homicide department said “new witnesses” and those with relevant information had been identified and a different timeline had emerged of Natalie Wood’s last hours on the boat and when help was requested.

At that February press conference , John Corina, a lieutenant in the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department Homicide Bureau, said that Robert Wagner, 88, was “a person of interest” in her death and they would like to speak with him again and hear his version of events. The new witnesses, he said, were people in boats moored near the Wagner yacht who heard a couple loudly arguing as well as a woman calling for help.

“[Wagner] is a person of interest, because he was the last one with Natalie Wood. And somehow she ends up in the water and drowns," said Corina.

Natasha: The Biography of Natalie Wood

“The case is still open,” says Suzanne Finstad, author of Natasha: The Biography of Natalie Wood . (Natasha was the name her Russian family called her.) When Finstad’s book was published in 2009, it contained startling claims about arguments between Wood and Wagner shortly before she was declared missing from their yacht. The source was the fourth person on the boat, its captain, Dennis Davern, who is now 70. In the February press conference, Corina said the witness statements from those who heard a couple fighting matched up with what Davern has said in recent police interviews.

Corina added that his department have also talked to witnesses who saw the group on Catalina Island that weekend as well as people who knew Wagner and Wood. Some of the details that have emerged about the last hours of the yacht are ugly, with whispers of drunkenness, rage, and accused infidelity.

The life of Natalie Wood is like a Russian matryonshka doll, a set of wooden dolls nesting in one another. When you pick up one doll, you find another inside, over and over. Even those who thought themselves familiar with the life story of the sparkling Wood would be taken aback by the reality of her childhood.

Born Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko, Wood was the daughter of Russian immigrants. (Studio executives changed Natalia’s name to Natalie Wood when she first started acting as a child.) Her father, Nikolai Zakharenko, was a laborer given to violent alcoholic rages, and her mother, Maria, was a fantasist and abusive taskmaster who drove her tiny daughter to become the family breadwinner, according to Finstad’s biography and other books, documentaries, and articles about Wood.

Maria’s family fled to China after the Russian Revolution, and when she was a child, she said she had her fortune read by a gypsy in Harbin. The fortune teller told her that her second child “would be a great beauty, known throughout the world.” But she also said that Maria must “beware of dark water.” Maria passed on that fear to her second daughter, while pushing her to fulfill that first prophecy.

There are harrowing stories of Maria’s career as a stage mother. She was determined that her daughter, after receiving small parts, would be cast in the 1946 film Tomorrow Is Forever alongside Orson Welles. The character was that of an emotionally fragile girl orphaned by the Nazis. To win the part, Wood would have to be able to cry on cue. Her mother wasn’t sure she could do it. At the studio, clutching her seven-year-old daughter before her screen test, Maria whispered to her to think of the death of the family dog.

But she went much further than that, according to Finstad’s book. “Her mother pulled her to the side, where no one else could see, ‘took a live butterfly out of a jar and tore the wings off it.’ Tenderhearted Natasha went into hysterics as her mother called out, ‘She’s ready!’ grabbing her by the hand and pushing her in front of the camera.”

Wood was so moving in the film that she won a long-term studio contract. She was famously hard-working, learning not just her lines but everyone else’s, and earning the nickname “One Take Natalie.” She performed in a dizzying number of movies, including The Ghost and Mrs. Muir , and, as she reached her teen years, wore braids and frilly dresses so she could play younger roles.

But, unsurprisingly, Wood rebelled from her mother’s tight control and her ultra-wholesome image by the time she was 16. She wanted to be a “real” actress, an artist, and with some difficulty won a part in Rebel Without a Cause , co-starring James Dean and Sal Mineo.

This period also launched her sexual rebelliousness. Wood, 16, had an affair with the 44-year-old director, Nicholas Ray, and also slept with her co-star Dennis Hopper, according to Finstad’s book. In the next few years she would date entertainers like Elvis Presley and heartthrob Tab Hunter. In Hunter’s case she was playing the part of beard, since the gay actor was then in the closet.

Wagner was different. She had long had a crush on the handsome actor, and they went on their first date on her 18th birthday. They married one year later, in 1957, becoming Hollywood’s golden couple. But the marriage did not last. Following their divorce in 1962, Wood dated Warren Beatty before marrying British producer Richard Gregson in 1969. It was with Gregson that she had her first daughter, Natasha .

To the delight of her fans, after she divorced Gregson in 1972, Wood got back in touch with Wagner. They remarried that same year, one decade after their divorce. This time, the marriage flourished, and they had a daughter, Courtney. Wagner’s career took off when he found a hit TV series in Hart to Hart . During that time, Wood made fewer films. Some say she wanted to devote more time to her family, but she was also finding it hard to get good parts after 40.

Wood’s last movie was Brainstorm , in which she played a scientist married to a fellow scientist portrayed by Christopher Walken. The New York-based actor had just won an Academy Award for The Deer Hunter . Wood told friends she was worried that she looked older than Walken onscreen (she was five years his senior), but they struck up a friendship, and rumors swirled about their connection.

The film’s first assistant director, David McGiffert told Wood’s biographer, “It wasn’t like they were lovey-dovey on the set or anything like that, but they just had a current about them, and an electricity.”

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For the Thanksgiving weekend of 1981, Wood and Wagner invited Walken to join them as they sailed around Catalina Island, a rocky getaway about 22 miles off the shores of Los Angeles. Wagner loved his yacht Splendour and the family spent as much time on it as they could; in a 1979 TV interview, Wood talked about how it allowed the family to escape the public eye. “It’s easy with the boat,” she said with a smile.

Davern, a family friend as well as Navy vet, was the captain that fateful weekend. He has said in multiple interviews—and in a book that he co-wrote with Marti Rulli , titled Goodbye Natalie, Goodbye Splendour— that after Natalie Wood’s body was found, Wagner him and Walken to stick to the original story. That was the timeline that showed up in the 1981 coroner’s report : Natalie went to bed first; when Wagner after chatting with Walken went to join her, he saw she was missing and so was the dinghy.

However, Davern now says, that wasn’t the whole truth.

“The argument started the day before,” Davern told Nancy Grace in a televised interview years later. “The tension was going through the whole weekend. Robert Wagner was jealous of Christopher Walken.”

According to Davern, Wood and Walken spent hours at a bar on Catalina Island, laughing and seemingly flirting. When her husband showed up, he was fuming. The four proceeded to have dinner at Doug’s Harbor Reef Restaurant, drinking champagne, two bottles of wine, and cocktails. At one point, Wood or Walken threw a glass at the wall, employees of the restaurant told Finstad.

The restaurant manager saw how drunk the members of the group were becoming, and worried they would not be able to reach their yacht safely when they staggered out just after 10 p.m. Using their inflatable dinghy, Valiant , the group did reach Splendour that night, but Wood was dead hours before sunrise.

The story of what happened when the four of them returned to the yacht has changed several times. According to Finstad’s book, Walken early on told the investigators that he and Wagner got into a “small beef” about a parent being away from young children for an extended time shooting a movie, as Natalie was doing. Apologies were made, and the spat died down.

However, in his most recent version , Davern says they resumed drinking wine and that a very heated argument exploded, during which Wagner broke a bottle of wine on a table and shouted at Walken, “Are you trying to f—-k my wife?”

Goodbye Natalie, Goodbye Splendour

Davern said Walken left to go to his own room “and that was the last I saw of him.” Wood also left for her state room, with Wagner following, and Davern heard the ensuing loud quarrel. While Davern did not see them at this point, he said he heard the argument continue on the deck of the boat, before “everything went silent.” After a time, he decided to check on the situation, and found Wagner alone on deck, saying, “Natalie is missing.” He asked Davern to start looking for her.

When his search was unsuccessful, Davern said he rejoined Wagner, who then told him, “The dinghy is missing too.” With Natalie Wood being “deathly afraid of water,” Davern says he doubted she would have taken out the small boat herself. He has said in multiple interviews that Wagner, saying he didn’t want to attract bad publicity, refused to turn on the boat’s flood lights and delayed calling for help.

Sheriff’s investigators have referred to a key witness statement from Marilyn Wayne , who happened to be in a boat moored 80 feet away at the time. Wayne said that around 11 p.m., she heard a woman calling out, saying, “Somebody please help me, I’m drowning.” The cries went on until almost 11:30 pm. When Wayne’s boyfriend tried to call the harbormaster, no one answered. Also, there might have been a party on another boat moored off the island, so they wondered if it was all a joke.

Most troubling, it seems there was a critical gap before anyone learned Wood was missing. Far from notifying authorities “immediately,” according to Finstad’s reporting in her book as well as Davern in his many television and print interviews, Wagner did not make the first call to shore until 1:30 a.m.

Lana Wood , Natalie’s younger sister, has often called for Wagner to say more about what happened that night. “She would never have left the boat like that, undressed, in just a nightgown,” said Wood in one TV interview.

In 2013, Wagner released a statement through his attorney, Blair Berk, as reported by E! News : "Mr. Wagner has fully cooperated over the last 30 years in the investigation of the accidental drowning of his wife in 1981. Mr. Wagner has been interviewed on multiple occasions by the Los Angeles sheriff’s department and answered every single question asked of him by detectives during those interviews.”

The sheriff’s department said in February that the team is still working to see if more witnesses can still remember the night and may help fill in the timeline and provide more clues about when exactly Wood went into the water. “We’re doing our last shot here to see if anyone else will come forward,” said Corina at the press conference .

Finstad said that something could still advance the investigation: “In the past several months I’ve sent the lead detective two new incriminating eyewitnesses to Natalie’s injuries. After my book was published I found a key witness Davern called in a panic hours after Natalie drowned to confide how she went overboard,” the biographer told Town & Country.

Wagner has never been charged with any crime in connection to the death of his wife, meaning that if he chose to give further statements to the police, it would be purely voluntary. According to the Associated Press , “Investigators made at least 10 attempts to interview Wagner again after reopening the investigation in 2011, including tracking him down in Colorado. But either Wagner or his lawyer refused.”

“We would love to talk to Robert Wagner,” said Corina. “He’s refused to talk to us….We can never force him to talk to us. He has rights and he can not talk to us if he doesn’t want to.”

The Sheriff’s Department’s public acknowledgement that Wagner was a person of interest only deepens the tragedy for Finstad. “The L.A. Coroner, remarkably, officially changed her cause of death 30 years later—which means that Wood’s suspicious and gruesome death was never investigated and she was wrongly and publicly blamed and shamed as the drunken cause of her own death,” says Finstad.

Wagner, called “R.J.” by those who know him, appeared to have been shattered by the loss of his wife. He wrote in his memoir , “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.”

Natalie and R.J.’s daughter, Courtney, was seven years old when she lost her mother. Courtney has continually expressed her love and support for her father, praising his efforts to protect his children, and told one interviewer , “There are certain people in our lives that continue to drudge up all this speculation and stories every year for no other reason than to indulge themselves.”

Like Wagner, Walken has said very little in public about Wood’s death. In one of his few statements, he suggested that people couldn’t handle the strangeness, the randomness, of Wood’s drowning.

“Anybody there saw the logistics—of the boat, the night, where we were, that it was raining—and would know exactly what happened,” Walken said in a Playboy interview in 1997 , his fullest public response to the tragedy. “You hear about things happening to people—they slip in the bathtub, fall down the stairs, step off the curb in London because they think that the cars come the other way—and they die. You feel you want to die making an effort at something; you don’t want to die in some unnecessary way.”

For those who knew Wood, it is the ugliness of her death that is so deeply painful, for she was a kind, warm woman who took pride in looking her best. And up to that last fateful weekend, she seemed to have been deeply in love with her husband.

“I guess we do belong together,” she said in an interview with Hollywood columnist Shirley Eder , talking about her compatibility with Robert Wagner. “Yeah, I think we do.”

Or as adorable Susan Walker said in A Miracle on 34th Street, “I believe, I believe. It’s silly, but I believe.”

Nancy Bilyeau, a former staff editor at InStyle, Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly, has written a thriller set in the 18th century art and porcelain world titled 'The Blue.' For more information, see www.nancybilyeau.com.

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Natalie Wood's Fatal Voyage

The 1981 drowning of natalie wood, while splendour , the yacht belonging to her and her husband, robert wagner, was anchored off catalina island, remains one of hollywood's darkest mysteries. the star of splendor in the grass and rebel without a cause , whose tempestuous search for love had led her finally to remarry wagner, was terrified of deep water. how had she ended up in the pacific in the middle of the night drawing on the police report—which includes interviews with wagner, christopher waken (wood's then co-star), and others—as well as details from the yacht's captain, sam kashner reveals the jealousy and rage of that deadly evening..

Natalie Wood's Fatal Voyage Sam Kashner March 2000

"This is the Splendour , needs help." With those words, 51-year-old actor Robert Wagner and Dennis Davern, the captain of Splendour , sounded the alarm around 1:30 A.M., on November 29, 1981, that Wagner's wife, Natalie Wood, had disappeared from the 60-foot yacht the couple owned. Approximately six hours later, Wood's body, clad in only a flannel nightgown, red down jacket, and blue wool socks, was found floating facedown in the Pacific about a mile away, 200 yards off Blue Cavern Point on Catalina Island. Just to the south, Prince Valiant, the 13-foot inflatable dinghy belonging to Splendour , had washed up on the rocks, its ignition key switched to "off," the gearshift in neutral, and the oars up in a locked position.

The death of the 43-year-old actress stunned Hollywood. "It's hard to describe the horror of this thing," said Fred Astaire, a family friend who had played the father of Wagner's character from 1968 until 1970 in the popular television series It Takes a Thief. As both the Coroner's Office and the Sheriff's Department began to investigate, rumors and questions swirled in Hollywood: What had brought Wood, whose fear of deep water was legendary, to leave the yacht in the middle of a cold, starless night and board the dinghy?

"I'm afraid of water that is dark," she had told a journalist just weeks before her death.

As the details of the weekend surfaced, the questions multiplied. Wood had invited the actor Christopher Walken, then 38, with whom she had been filming a science fiction thriller called Brainstorm, to be her guest aboard Splendour over the Thanksgiving weekend. The Wagners, accompanied by Walken and Davern, had sailed to Catalina Island, 22 miles off the California coast, leaving around noon on Friday, November 27. They anchored off Avalon, the island's main town, and went ashore for shopping and a few beers, leaving Davern behind. The following afternoon they sailed to Isthmus Cove, an isolated spot at the northern end of the island with a tiny community that caters to yachtsmen. They dined that evening at Doug's Harbor Reef, the only restaurant on the cove. Some of the restaurant's staff thought the Wagner party was drinking rather heavily and later remembered volatile behavior on Wood's part. After the group departed, Don Whiting, the restaurant's manager, warned Kurt Craig, the harbormaster, to keep an eye out for their safety. They boarded Valiant at about 10 and motored back to Splendour .

"I remember her sitting there saying, I think my biggest fear would be to drown."

What happened next, aboard the yacht, has been a subject of continuing speculation and innuendo. What is definitely known is that Wood retired for the evening. Sometime later Wagner went to check on her and discovered that both she and the dinghy were missing.

A few days after the tragedy, John Payne and his girlfriend, Marilyn Wayne, a Los Angeles commodities broker, contacted police to say they had been sleeping aboard a boat, Capricorn, which was moored near Splendour that night. Around midnight Payne heard a woman yelling, "Help me, someone please help me!" The voice was coming from near the stern of Splendour and, Payne believed, from someone in a dinghy. He awakened Wayne, who heard the cries, too. The couple claimed they hadn't responded because a loud, drunken party was raging on another nearby yacht, and they had thought someone was just "playing around." Indeed, they had heard a man's very drunken voice respond mockingly, "O.K., honey, we'll get you." They believed the voice belonged to someone at the party, which evidently reinforced their notion that the whole thing was a joke.

T he public face in the ensuing investigations was that of Thomas Noguchi, chief medical examiner in the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office. The autopsy revealed that Wood had died of drowning, and that her body had "superficial skin bruises" on the arms and lower legs and a vertical abrasion on the left cheek, such as might have been caused by falling into the water. The toxicology report showed that her blood-alcohol level was at least .14 percent—.04 percent above the level used in California to determine intoxication in automobile drivers.

At a November 30, 1981, press conference to announce the autopsy results, Noguchi trod gingerly, downplaying Wood's apparent inebriation at the time of her death and any other sensational aspects of the case. The coroner was already under fire for his handling of the death of actor William Holden, who two weeks earlier had emptied a bottle of vodka in his Santa Monica apartment and then tripped, gashing his forehead on a bedside table. He had bled to death, according to Noguchi, probably because he was too drunk to stanch the wound or call for help. (By a strange coincidence, Holden's longtime companion was Stefanie Powers, Robert Wagner's then co-star in the hit television series Hart to Hart. The romantic chemistry on the show had generated speculation about a real-life romance between the two TV stars.) The Hollywood community was outraged that Noguchi had revealed Holden's drunkenness to the press, feeling it was an invasion of the deceased actor's privacy.

From the physical evidence in the Wood case Noguchi concluded that the actress had fallen into the water while trying to board the dinghy; fingernail scratches on Valiant's side showed she had tried to hoist herself up from the water, but since her down jacket would quickly have become waterlogged, she was probably impeded by the extra weight. Evidently she never thought to remove the jacket, perhaps because her judgment was clouded by alcohol. She clung to the dinghy's side as it drifted away from Splendour and the other boats in the harbor, until, finally, overcome by exhaustion and hypothermia, she drowned.

Before his press conference, Noguchi outlined this theory to his staff, only to have one of his colleagues point out, "What the reporters out there are really interested in, Dr. Noguchi, isn't so much whether Natalie Wood was intoxicated or not, but why she left the yacht in the middle of the night. "

Realizing the truth of that statement, Noguchi later wrote, he commissioned a "psychological autopsy" to find out why Wood "felt she should separate herself from her husband and Walken that night." However, when the report "on the real facts of the death of Natalie Wood" came in, Noguchi "decided not to release the document to the press. It added details the media would only call 'gory' and 'sensational.' The report did not alter the official coroner's conclusion of an accidental drowning. So, rather than create more media indignation over 'too many details,' I reluctantly filed away that report."

Noguchi's discretion failed to save his job; complaints from Frank Sinatra and the Screen Actors Guild, among others, continued to accuse him of sensationalizing his duties. He was demoted on April 27, 1982.

I n his 1983 book, Coroner, about his most celebrated cases, Noguchi returned to the mysterious death of Natalie Wood—indeed, he began the book with it. After acknowledging the crucial questions—"Wasn't it strange that the two men on the yacht didn't even know that she had left the boat? Hadn't she spoken to them? Why had she slipped out to the stem of the yacht in the middle of the night, climbed down a ladder, and untied the dinghy? What was she doing? And where was she going? And why?" and also "When she first fell off the swimming step into the water, why didn't she simply swim a few strokes and reboard the yacht by way of the step? It must have been only a few feet away from her. Even with the heavy jacket, she could have accomplished this effort easily"—he proceeded not to answer any of them. Instead, he spun a dramatic yam about Wood's clinging to the dinghy as she attempted to propel it to the beach by kicking her feet.

Through his attorney, Paul Ziffren, and friends, Wagner gave his story, saying that the cruise had been a happy one before ending in the freak accident of Wood's death. Two years later, Walken spoke for the record. "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. Because the truth is, there is nothing more to it. It was an accident." Other than that, the two have maintained silence about the incident. (Both declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Doubts about the accident theory have, in fact, never died down, especially in the tabloid press. The principal reason for that is the only other person on the boat that night: Dennis Davern, who claims he has always believed that something more sinister occurred. Davern, now 51, says that the account he gave to police investigators in the days after Wood's death was incomplete, sanitized, and in some places downright false. Over the years he has offered parts of his story—for money—to various tabloids, and has occasionally appeared on television, most notoriously in February 1992, on Geraldo Rivera's Now It Can Be Told, when he was filmed without his knowledge discussing an argument aboard Splendour and implying that he knew how Wood got into the water. In the early 1990s he visited New York publishers in an unsuccessful attempt to interest them in a book on the subject.

Despite the fact that Davern is not the most savory witness, he tells a compelling story, one that has been fairly consistent in its various public incarnations even as it has grown with damning details. Now, it seems, widespread interest in the case is about to ignite once again, as two new biographies of Wood are in the works (one by Gavin Lambert with the cooperation of Robert Wagner; another, Natasha: The Biography of Natalie Wood, by Suzanne Finstad, author of several true-crime books).

Recently, Vanity Fair spoke with Dennis Davern and also with Duane Rasure, the lead police investigator on the case. Rasure shared a copy of the police report, which at last gives us crucial details and testimony from all involved. Surprisingly, in almost all instances, the interviews with witnesses— waiters, hotel clerks, other yachtsmen, and, most notably, Christopher Walken, whose police interrogation is the only detailed account we have from him—tend to back up Davern's story that Natalie Wood's fatal fall was not simply an accident, as Robert Wagner has maintained, but the final act in a two-day drama of jealousy and rage, fueled by round-the-clock drinking.

I t's as if we always knew her, growing up in America, watching Natalie Wood live out her 43 years in darkened movie theaters across the country. Photoplay and Modern Screen were devoted to her in the 1950s: Wood in a boat-necked shirt, her hair freshly bobbed, feeding the porpoises at Marineland with Nick Adams, her co-star in Rebel Without a Cause; Wood being playfully spanked by handsome, blond Tab Hunter, whom Warner Bros, tried with little success to team romantically with her in The Burning Hills and The Girl He Left Behind.

Her youthful marriage to Robert Wagner, then a promising contract player, was catnip to the fan magazines. The envied couple were often seen nestled in an outsize red banquette at Jean Leon's La Scala in Beverly Hills. Tom Wolfe described Wood's "great big marvelous huge mothering brown eyes," but she was really an American girl, struggling to grow up in film after film, from the doubting child who comes to believe in Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street to the rebellious teenager in Rebel Without a Cause to the yearning high-school girl destined for madness in Splendor in the Grass.

"She was right there at the apotheosis of the 50s," a friend of Wood's once said. After all, she hung out with both James Dean and Elvis Presley. (The two days she spent with the latter in November 1956 in Memphis were a big disappointment. "He can sing," she later confided to her younger sister, Lana, now 54 years old and the head of Lana Wood Casting in Hollywood, "but he can't do much else") She had been a child star for 13 years when, in the summer of 1956, she had her first date with Robert Wagner, known as "R.J." to his friends. She was 18, he was 26. She was the sought-after veteran of 25 films and had just made the rare successful transition to adult actress; he was an aspiring actor at Twentieth Century Fox, the son of a wellto-do steel executive. He had grown up in a house overlooking the Bel-Air Country Club, where he caddied for such stars as Clark Gable and Fred Astaire. His first real break came in 1952 when studio head Darryl F. Zanuck gave him a small role as a shell-shocked soldier in Walter Lang's With a Song in My Heart. Susan Hayward, playing real-life music-hall entertainer Jane Froman, sings to Wagner's tremulous soldier while tears run down his face. Thousands of fan letters poured in, auguring bigger roles to come. Two years later, however, he was stuck playing Prince Valiant in a pageboy wig and a padded body stocking complete with rubber calves. The $3 million CinemaScope epic did all right at the box office, but it was lethal to a budding career as a serious actor. Wagner later recalled wincingly that the Methodtrained actors at the studio used to drop by the set to laugh at his ridiculous getup, and Dean Martin mistook him for Jane Wyman because of his wig.

"I do not know which came first, the end of her marriage or Warren Beatty."

A t the same time, Wood was becoming a different kind of star. In 1955 she had played Judy in Rebel Without a Cause, which established her as a teen idol and won her an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress. (She lost to Jo Van Fleet in East of Eden.) While campaigning for the part, she was briefly hospitalized after a serious car accident with Dennis Hopper, then 18 years old and her co-star in the movie. When Wood was called a "juvenile delinquent" by the police, she was ecstatic and made sure Rebel's 43-year-old director, Nicholas Ray—who had been skeptical because of her good-girl image—knew about it. It wasn't long before the under-age actress fell into an affair with her director, meeting him secretly at the Chateau Marmont, just off Sunset Boulevard. Hopper remembered in Bernard Eisenschitz's Nicholas Ray: An American Journey that he "got into terrible problems" with Ray, "because we were both fucking Natalie Wood.... Nick snitched on me. I was furious with him: the studio came down on me, and he came out of it as pure as snow."

Wagner, on the other hand, cultivated older, established stars, such as Spencer Tracy, who became a mentor after the two worked together in Broken Lance (1954) and The Mountain (1956). Even though "Natalie was running around with people R.J. wouldn't have in his house," as a friend remembers, a romance ignited and became one of the most publicized in the history of Hollywood. Wagner shared his love of boats with Wood. In fact, the two consummated their relationship during a moonlit sail on Wagner's boat My Lady— and, according to Lana Wood, continued to celebrate the anniversary every year.

They were married on December 28, 1957, in Scottsdale, Arizona. Los Angeles Times columnist Joyce Haber later described them as being "the most photographed, talked-about, envied couple since Wally Simpson and Edward VIII." Many speculated that the marriage would boost Wagner's career.

The couple spent much of their honeymoon on the water, first cruising the Florida Keys, where they met with a potential disaster at sea. Writing in Modern Screen in April 1958, gossip columnist Louella Parsons reported that

Mrs. Wagner got on the long distance phone to tell me, "We're just now catching our breath. You've never seen anything like the storm that hit Florida just as we arrived to board the boat we'd chartered for a cruise." ... It was Bob on the telephone now. "The worst storm to hit the Florida coast in fifteen years blows up! ... You'll never believe what was happening to that boat as we tried to make our way back to port. It was pitching like a wild horse. Dishes and glasses were crashing all over the galley.... It was all but impossible for our skipper to see one wave ahead of us. I was so worried about Nat. It was an awful ordeal for her."

After returning to Los Angeles, the newlyweds dropped anchor just off Catalina aboard My Lady. The small island, with its rich Hollywood history, would become a favorite escape. "I love being on the water and near the water," Natalie would later say, "but not in the water."

"Hollywood prepares you for life in front of the camera," Lana Wood once observed, "but it doesn't prepare you for private life."

The writer Thomas Thompson, a close friend of Natalie's who first met her when he was assigned to interview her for Life magazine, recalled that at the beginning of the marriage "Natalie was in emotional ruins." She was insecure and suspicious of everyone, even of Wagner. Controlled by the studios and her ambitious Russian emigre stage mother, Maria Gurdin, who had pushed her into movies when she was only five, Wood suddenly realized that she had no idea who she was—she had spent her life taking on the roles of other people. "I was unable to make a decision of any kind. People had told me what to do all my life," she later said.

Wood had terrible insomnia, lying awake at night trying to figure out why she was so unhappy. She began to rely on sleeping pills and finally told Wagner that she wanted to consult a psychiatrist. "For eight years she spent lunch hours every day— every day!—with her analyst, and she turned down important film roles because they would take her away from the couch," Thompson observed.

I mportant roles nevertheless continued to come her way. Even the box-office disappointments of her two 1958 films, the hotly anticipated Marjorie Morningstar, based on the Herman Wouk best-seller, and Frank Sinatra's Kings Go Forth, didn't knock her off the A-list. Wagner, however, continued to have career troubles. Seven years earlier, he had been spoken of in the same breath with Tony Curtis and Rock Hudson, but Twentieth Century Fox was putting the boyishly handsome actor in such clinkers as Sail a Crooked Ship and Say One for Me.

"Here was Natalie, starring in a major movie like Splendor in the Grass, and here was R.J. doing dogs like Stopover Tokyo," one film director recalled. Wood attempted to resuscitate her husband's career by appearing with him in the 1960 film All the Fine Young Cannibals— an overripe Tennessee Williams knockoff. "I was white trash, looking for money" is how Wood described her role in the film. "Bob was a trumpet player living with a black woman who was a singer. We all wore wigs." The movie was an embarrassing flop. Wagner wouldn't appear on-screen again for nearly two years, while Wood began filming one of her most important movies, William Inge's Splendor in the Grass, opposite Warren Beatty.

With this movie Wood's and Wagner's real troubles began. "I do not know which came first," Lana Wood said, "the end of her marriage or Warren Beatty."

Splendor in the Grass, set in Kansas in the 1920s, was directed by the celebrated stage director Elia Kazan. Wood breaks your heart in the role of Deanie Loomis, who's nearly destroyed in the struggle between her love for her high-school sweetheart, Bud, played with immense appeal by Beatty, and the puritanical tyranny of small-town America, embodied by her interfering mother, played by Audrey Christie. Under Kazan's brilliant direction, Wood has an on-screen breakdown that is almost too painful to watch: Deanie, clad in a red dress, tries to drown herself in a reservoir. (For her work in the film, Wood would win her second Academy Award nomination.)

"Id never in a million years seen them fight like that before... stuff getting thrown around."

Beatty was making his film debut in the movie; he had been championed for the part by Inge, who had become enamored of the handsome actor during the 1959 Broadway run of his play A Loss of Roses, in which Beatty had played the lead. At first, Beatty and Wood did not get along, and there was concern that their love scenes were not generating sparks. Beatty was living with Joan Collins at the time, but at some point during filming, the passionate kissing on-camera began to catch fire. Kazan believed, as he later wrote, that "it was clear to Natalie ... that Warren was bound for the top; this perception was an aphrodisiac." One day Wagner arrived on the set and found Beatty's arm wrapped around Wood's waist while they were waiting for the lights to be set up. Beatty accused Wagner of keeping tabs on them. Wagner reacted with embarrassment and barely controlled rage. Kazan noticed the storm brewing, but he felt that if the budding affair between his two young actors helped their love scenes, he didn't mind. The director regretted only the obvious pain the affair was causing Wagner. What made it even worse, according to Kazan's autobiography, Elia Kazan: A Life, was that Wagner's "sexual humiliation was public."

Wagner finally walked out and went to stay on his boat at Newport Beach. His and Wood's separation and subsequent divorce in 1963 shocked Hollywood. Elizabeth Taylor was said to have become so upset that she had to take to her bed. "Why does she need sedating?" asked Wood, who had a famously competitive relationship with Taylor. "It's my marriage that just collapsed."

To many observers, Wagner suffered the most. His career continued to decline, while Wood's flourished. "It just didn't seem fair," wrote a friend of Wagner's. "It must be admitted, he was probably jealous of her continued success. Natalie, however, had an enormous, single-minded ambition, and nothing was going to stop her."

While her marriage was crumbling, Wood made some of the best films of her career— West Side Story in 1961 and Gypsy in 1962. To help prepare her for the role of the brainy burlesque queen Gypsy Rose Lee, Beatty took her to a strip club to watch two featured strippers: Fran Sinatra and Natalie Should. He also showed up on the set of Gypsy nearly every day.

T he sea would play a dangerous and fateful role throughout Wood's life. While filming Splendor in the Grass, the actress's fear of the water came to Kazan's attention. A few days before shooting the reservoir scene, Wood confided to the director that she had a deep-seated "terror of water, particularly dark water, and of being helpless in it." Kazan, schooled in Stanislavskian method, remembered thinking how perfect that was for the scene. Wood asked him if it couldn't be shot in a small studio tank, but the director refused. He explained that the reservoir was shallow and her feet would always touch bottom. She wasn't reassured, but she did the scene and did it well. But back on dry land, Kazan remembered, Wood shivered with fear and then laughed hysterically with relief.

It was not the First time that Wood's phobia had become an issue. When she was 11, in 1949, on the set of RKO's The Green Promise, she was supposed to cross a bridge that was rigged to collapse once she reached the other side; however, somebody pulled the lever when she was halfway across, and she fell into the water below. "I don't even remember them fishing me out," Wood later recalled.

An even more harrowing incident occurred while filming The Star with Bette Davis in 1952. Ironically, it happened off Catalina, on a freezing January morning. The director, Stuart Heisler, wanted Wood to leap over the railing of Sterling Hayden's private yacht. "Just jump," Heisler told her. "There will be men in rowboats to pick you up." When she hit the water she panicked and began screaming. Davis threatened to quit if they made Wood do the scene again. When they reshot it with a double, the standin became entangled in the kelp and nearly drowned. "After all that," Wood said later, "they cut the scene from the movie."

Four years after making Splendor in the Grass, Wood had yet another heart-stopping moment at sea, while filming a scene with Robert Redford in Santa Monica Bay for Robert Mulligan's Inside Daisy Clover. A giant rogue wave suddenly reared up, separating a small boat containing Wood and Redford from the crew and technicians. Mulligan recalled that "there was no way we could get Natalie and Bob off the boat, and the lines to keep them in place were breaking right and left." Redford thought the whole thing was a lark, but Wood was terrified.

W ith their careers going in opposite directions, who would ever have predicted that Wood and Wagner would be reunited, as they were in 1972. In the nine years between their divorce and remarriage, Wagner moved to Europe to try to change the course of his nearly moribund career. He had better luck there, landing an important cameo in Darryl Zanuck's 1962 World War II epic, The Longest Day, and showing an unexpected gift for light comedy in Blake Edwards's 1964 movie The Pink Panther; he also married his second wife, Marion Marshall Donen, who had recently been divorced from the director Stanley Donen.

"I grew up at last," Wagner has said of the period, during which his good friend Paul Newman offered him the role of a lifetime: that of a weak rich man's son who turns out to be the villain in the 1966 film Harper. "That's the part that made me. For the first time, I got some damn good reviews," he recalled. The whole course of Wagner's career would soon change again, however: he would make his mark not in film but on television.

"In the sixties," Wagner later said about the film business, "everybody was an antihero. There weren't many parts for a guy like me." Then Lew Wasserman, the president of MCA, called Wagner into his office and pulled out a copy of TV Guide. "This is where you belong!" he said. When the opportunity came for Wagner to play the debonair ex-con in the new ABC television series It Takes a Thief, he was ready. Premiering in 1968, the show became a hit, earning Wagner $10,000 per episode and giving him the role—that of "a small-screen version of Cary Grant"—for which he was perfectly suited.

Lana Wood noticed that her sister reacted with dismay when she learned of Wagner's marriage to Donen; she was inconsolable when she heard that the couple was expecting a child. Wagner showed up at La Scala passing out cigars to celebrate the birth of his daughter Katharine in 1964; Natalie happened to be there that night, sitting in "their" booth. When he passed by Wood's table, "they looked at each other across years of melancholy," Thomas Thompson later wrote.

A fter Beatty reportedly picked up the hatcheck girl at Chasen's and left Wood alone and humiliated at the table (Suzanne Finstad, who says she has spoken to almost 400 people for her upcoming biography of Wood, calls this incident "unsubstantiated, recycled gossip"), Wood embarked on a string of paramours: Arthur Loew Jr. (heir to the theater chain); David Niven Jr.; the English actor Tom Courtenay; and Ladislav Blatnik, a Yugoslav playboy shoe magnate who, as a parlor trick, would eat Wood's Baccarat crystal glasses. She was miserable. One afternoon in late 1966, just after Beatty stopped by, she swallowed a handful of sleeping pills. Fortunately she was found by her friend and secretary, Mart Crowley, later a playwright and the author of The Boys in the Band. Crowley saved her life by rushing her to Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Hollywood. "All I know is this," Crowley later said. "Warren came by and they were talking. Then I heard raised voices and Warren left. Natalie went upstairs to her bedroom. That's when she took the pills."

But it wasn't just Beatty or his ill-timed visit; it was an accumulation of sorrows. A journalist who had befriended Wagner had predicted that "Natalie Wood will end up the real loser."

Then Richard Gregson, a charming English agent and producer, rescued her from all that. Their 1969 Russian Orthodox wedding was spectacular, held at the Holy Virgin Mary Cathedral in Los Angeles; Wood's silk wedding dress had been designed by Edith Head. Her good friend Robert Redford was best man. However, the marriage was short-lived; the couple separated just months after the September 29, 1970, birth of their child, a girl they named Natasha (Natalie's Russian name). She threw Gregson out of the house when she reportedly learned he was having an affair.

A few months earlier, Wagner and Marion Donen had filed for divorce. As work took him away from his family for longer periods, the marriage had deteriorated.

Wagner briefly dated Tina Sinatra, even becoming engaged to her and hanging out at the Sinatra compound in Palm Springs. But once Wood had put Gregson out of her life, Wagner came calling.

"Things happened fast," Lana Wood observed. "They fell as hard, if not harder, than they had the first time. They were thrilled and confused."

They chose the 1972 Academy Awards ceremony at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to re-emerge in public as a couple. As they stepped out of a limousine, their appearance caused pandemonium. Lana Wood recalled: "It was a reunion the whole world felt sentimental about."

I n spring 1972, Wood accompanied Wagner to London aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2 on a junket to promote a new television film he'd made with Bette Davis, Madame Sin. But the morning after the couple left New York Harbor for Southampton, a freak storm with 70-foot swells rose up and engulfed the ocean liner for four days. According to Warren G. Harris, author of Natalie and R.J., Wood and Wagner hid out in their cabin, fatalistically drinking champagne and eating caviar. When they emerged unharmed on the other side of the Atlantic, they decided to remarry.

They were married for the second time aboard Ramblin' Rose, a borrowed yacht, on July 16, 1972. The yacht cruised along the California coast and stopped near Malibu at Paradise Cove. After letting the guests off the boat, the newlyweds made their blissful way to Catalina for their second honeymoon.

The history of Catalina is entwined with the history of Hollywood. Clark Gable filmed Mutiny on the Bounty in those island waters; Errol Flynn swashbuckled as Captain Blood off the Catalina coast. The pretty tourist town of Avalon, a one-square-mile village named for the mythical isle where King Arthur's body was taken after his death, inspired the 1920 song "Avalon," one of A1 Jolson's big hits. A film crew once imported a small herd of buffalo for a 1924 movie; their progeny—400 strong—still roam the remote, craggy hills high above the blue waters of the Pacific. Since the 1920s, Hollywood stars including Jean Harlow, John Barrymore, Douglas Fairbanks, Humphrey Bogart, and John Wayne have moored their yachts in Avalon's sparkling harbor.

Throughout their second marriage, Wood and Wagner spent many weekends enjoying the pleasures of Catalina. "Our life started again—really beautifully—on that boat," Wagner told a longtime friend. The waters of Catalina were not supposed to be the scene of a tragedy.

I t is considered bad luck to change the name of a boat, but when Wagner and Wood bought Challenger in 1975, they nevertheless rechristened it Splendour, after a line in Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality." Wood loved the poem, which, as Deanie, she had movingly read in Splendor in the Grass, but she always insisted the name wasn't a reference to Kazan's film, from which she wanted to distance herself because of the infidelity and jealousy that had erupted on the set. Those passions were safely in the past—or were they?

The couple hired the young man who had helped bring the boat from Florida to California to serve as their captain. Dennis Davern had been around boats since he was six years old. His first vessel was a rowboat his parents had bought him when his family lived in Margate City, New Jersey, a suburb of Atlantic City. Davern is still lean, lanky, and agile, though his long hair and beard have darkened. He says he has always loved the sense of freedom the sea gives him. "I was always the black sheep," he says. "Everyone else stayed in New Jersey. I was the one to go."

Davern remembers that " Splendour was a big boat, with four staterooms and a full deck, and handrails all the way around. Even if you don't like boats," he says, "it would be like going on a cruise ship. You'd feel safe.... R.J. only paid 125 grand for it because it wasn't a powerful boat. The original 16-cylinder diesel engine had been replaced with a pair of 8-cylinder diesels, not worth a whole lot, but Natalie wouldn't have cared that the boat was underpowered. She was happy to go along at 10 miles an hour when you're supposed to be going 30. If you went fast in the boat with her in it, you'd be pushing your luck."

Wagner and Wood often included their skipper in festivities aboard Splendour. "With a lot of boat owners, you just try to stay out of the way. But as the years went by, we really got to know each other. We'd barbecue on the boat, and R.J. was the one who liked to put on the steaks, and Natalie would make the salad."

Davern loved working for the Wagners, and was impressed that they brought their children on board for outings almost every other weekend. By 1974 the Wagners' brood had grown to three: Katie, aged 10, from R.J.'s marriage to Marion; Natasha, Natalie's 4-year-old daughter with Gregson; and Courtney, R.J. and Natalie's daughter, bom on March 9, 1974. The couple finally seemed to have all the happiness that had eluded them the first time around. "I'm glad we divorced," Wood once told Thomas Thompson. "The intermission is what did it for us." Wood was fond of quoting Mickey Ziffren (the wife of the Wagners' lawyer Paul Ziffren), who had characterized the couple's nearly 10-year separation as Seitensprung, the German word for switching partners while you're dancing.

W ood and Wagner had switched not just partners but places as well. Wagner was at the apex of his career, portraying the suave Jonathan Hart in Hart to Hart, while Wood wasn't working much. "[Natalie] had a past," Lana Wood observed, "but [R.J.] had the present." And if Wagner's fame as a television star was a few notches below his wife's status as a film icon, so be it: television had made Wagner rich. Besides income from his own successful shows, the Wagners' production company would end up with almost half of the profits from the hit series Charlie's Angels, as part of a deal he had foiled with Aaron Spelling.

If television had rescued Wagner's flagging career, he reasoned, it might do the same for his wife's, so he started easing her into television, beginning with The Affair, in 1973, made when Natalie was pregnant with Courtney. Another television project that delighted her was playing Maggie the Cat opposite Wagner's Brick in Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, with Laurence Olivier as Big Daddy.

"When she had things to do," Davern recalls, "she was excited. She'd get a lot of movie scripts, but nothing would ever come of them."

By 1981, Wood had become a spokeswoman for RainTree's line of beauty products ("Keep your age a secret with RainTree"). Her film career had been in trouble for a long time. After This Property Is Condemned in 1966, there would be only six more films, and a cameo in Robert Redford's The Candidate in 1972. Her role in 1969's hit Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice was seen as something of a comeback, but then followed such flops as the private-eye spoof Peeper, with Michael Caine, in 1975, and the disaster movie Meteor, with Sean Connery and Henry Fonda, in 1979.

Part of the problem was that Natalie was "Old Hollywood even though she wasn't old," Lana Wood said. She was a product of the studio system who came into her maturity when that system was going out of style.

It wasn't just Wood's and Wagner's careers that underwent a reversal of fortune; their private lives followed suit. There was much speculation about the on-camera heat being generated between Wagner and the striking, brunette 39-year-old Stefanie Powers. Although Wood knew that Powers had, for a long time, been William Holden's girlfriend, she was jealous. One day she appeared with Natasha and Courtney on the set of Hart to Hart while Wagner and Powers were filming a love scene. The two girls began to cry, and Wood comforted them by saying, "This is just the way Daddy makes a living."

T hese were some of the pressures the couple took with them on weekend outings to Catalina. Davern recalls how he'd often "knock down a few bottles of wine with [Natalie and R.J.] Natalie was the real partyer. I'd tell her, 'I'll give you five quaaludes if you give me 10 Valiums,' because at that time I liked taking a Valium in the morning and floating all day long.... So it would be, 'Let's eat these quaaludes, let's chase them down with some wine.' They had total trust in me, so they could do anything they wanted."

The captain of Splendour was well aware of Wood's fear of the water. "We could sit in Catalina, on the mooring cable, and R.J. and the kids would be swimming off the back of the boat, and me and Natalie would be on the bridge.... We were each other's therapists sometimes. I remember her sitting there saying, 'I think my biggest fear would be to drown.' ... I remember it was a sunny day when she said that."

But it wasn't a sunny day when Wood invited Christopher Walken to join her and Wagner on Splendour over the 1981 Thanksgiving weekend. It was gray and cold, and the sea was rough.

Walken, who had won an Academy Award for best supporting actor in Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter two years earlier, was co-starring with Wood in Brainstorm, a science-fiction thriller, which also featured Louise Fletcher, who had won the bestactress Oscar in 1976 for One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Cliff Robertson, who had won best actor in 1969 for Charly.

According to Davern, Wood became infatuated with Walken during the filming and openly flirted with him. "When they were in North Carolina together, rumors were going around about Chris Walken and Natalie, so R.J. went down there," Davern explains. "He had a few days off from Hart to Hart ... but he wasn't about to make a fool of himself over this." Lana Wood also believed her sister had an infatuation with Walken. In her 1984 book, Natalie, Lana wrote, "I don't know if Natalie's [love affair] with Chris was imaginary or real, though my strong suspicion is that it was all in her mind and that perhaps she was only wishing it to be so." At least it seems that no romantic intrigue occurred on the set of Brainstorm, because Walken's wife, Georgianne, had been present for the duration of the shoot.

Then, out of the blue, Davern got word that Walken was coming on the boat for a weekend cruise to Catalina. "I don't think R.J. knew Christopher," Davern says. "He was more the young movie star, where R.J. had been around for years." It was a volatile situation, which may have been why Wood also invited Mart Crowley, who had been made a producer on Hart to Hart, and Peggy Griffin, her secretary. Both begged off, pleading too much work.

D avern didn't like Walken from the moment he appeared on the dock at Marina del Rey. The weather was miserable. "The heaters were on in the boat. We were only doing it because of Christopher ... who comes on board wearing a navy pea coat with the collar up. I don't know this guy from Adam, and I guess I felt the way R.J. felt."

They left around noon on Friday. Davern says he noticed that Wagner seemed put out by all the attention Wood was lavishing on their guest. "Christopher and Natalie are sitting in the salon together and giggling, and I'm looking at R.J. and thinking, He doesn't look too happy. R.J. was getting annoyed, and plus, we're drinking.... I was seeing R.J. getting mad. The boat just starts getting smaller. You can't look for a whole lot of escape."

Shortly after they left port, however, Walken got seasick and spent most of the rest of the crossing sleeping in his stateroom. When he emerged, the yacht was already in the harbor at Avalon. Since there were no moorings available, they had to anchor a quarter-mile off Avalon's Casino Ballroom, built in 1929 by William Wrigley, the chewinggum tycoon. Around five P.M., Wagner, Wood, and Walken went into town, while Davern stayed aboard to make dinner.

The trio shopped at a number of boutiques and then headed for El Galleon, a restaurant facing the harbor. They had a few beers and discussed how to get one of Avalon's jewelers to lower his prices. Darkness was falling when they reboarded Splendour, where Davern was preparing a barbecue. Walken, still feeling ill, decided to skip dinner and returned to his stateroom to lie down.

Then, according to a December 10, 1981, interview Davern had with police (in the presence of two attorneys, Stephen Miller and Mark Beck, whom Wagner had hired), since it was "'a grumpy sea' ... R.J. wanted to move the position of the boat, and Natalie said it wouldn't do any good ... [so] she said she would rather spend the night ashore."

Wagner's interview with police, on December 4, 1981, largely agreed with this story: "The sea was pretty rough. He [Wagner] recalled he did move the Splendour closer to shore to get out of the heavy sea. There had been some disagreement as to this move by Natalie and he told her to take Dennis [Davern], the captain, ashore and stay in a hotel for the night."

Today, however, Davern tells a different story about what happened: "There was some kind of argument going on. Christopher went down to take a nap or something, and Natalie and R.J. started fighting. I thought, I don't believe this! I don't believe this fight is still going on. This was later in the afternoon. Natalie says to R.J., 'You're being so silly.' It went back and forth and back and forth. Natalie finally says to R.J., 'I'm going ashore,' and she asks me, 'Dennis, will you take me ashore?'"

Wood wanted to leave, Davern says, because "the tension on the boat was unbearable." She had had enough and wanted to go home. Concerned that the fighting was getting out of hand, Davern says, he knocked on Walken's stateroom door and asked him to intervene. Walken refused, cautioning him, "Never get involved in an argument between a man and a wife."

Walken's main interview with police, which took place on December 3, 1981, in the actor's room (No. 601) at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, corroborates Davern's new version that an argument occurred between Wood and Wagner: "Being very ill he [Walken] returned to his bunk. He stated he felt he was aware of some kind of hubbub up above. There was no yelling. Approximately 20 minutes later he thought he heard the sound of an anchor chain. He then recalled Natalie coming to the door of his cabin and telling him, 'He wants to cross during the night.' He then recalled she left. He next remembered the captain contacting him and wanting him to come up to get involved. He stated he told the captain, 'Never get involved in an argument between a man and a wife.'"

Davern took Wood ashore in Valiant (which Wagner had jokingly named after what he considered his worst film) and the two headed for El Galleon. There, according to Paul Reynolds, the manager of the restaurant, in his police interview of November 29, 1981, they "requested to use the telephone to see if they could locate rooms for the night. He [Reynolds] stated he asked the victim if she had a boat and she replied 'no, is there a boat going back.' He advised her that the f next boat returning from the mainland would be at 10 a.m. the following morning. Mr. Reynolds then made a telephone call to the Pavilion Lodge [a nearby hotel in Avalon] and reserved two rooms for Ms. Wood. He further said Ms. Wood and this other man were sitting at the bar having a couple of drinks prior to leaving for the hotel."

T he Pavilion Lodge was not chosen for privacy—the rooms face an interior court off Avalon's main street, right on the harbor—but it was one of the few hotels that had rooms available on such short notice. Ann Laughton, the night receptionist at the Pavilion Lodge, recalled for police in her November 29, 1981, interview that Wood and Davern arrived at 11:15 P.M. and registered for two rooms. "[Laughton] further recalled that during registration they had asked her for some ice and she had shone [sic] them how to get it from the ice machine. She further added that they both appeared very intoxicated."

On November 29, 1981, in the first of his two interviews with police, at the sheriff's station at Isthmus harbor, Davern told police that "all four of them spent the night on the boat." The police, however, had prior knowledge that this wasn't true. They confronted Davern with his lie, and the boat captain "stated before answering that he'd rather talk to 'R.J.' and possibly an attorney." In his second interview, on December 10, in the presence of Wagner's attorneys, Davern admitted he had spent the night with Wood, because, in the Dragnet prose of the police report, "whenever Ms. Wood, victim, went ashore, he was usually directed to go with her to act as her bodyguard."

Davern now clarifies that he ended up staying in the room with Wood. "We just drank the wine and went to sleep," he says. "We thought it was best for me to stay with her, for protection. She knew I wasn't going to make any kind of play for her—she was comfortable with me."

The police report confirms that Socorro Meza, an employee at the Pavilion Lodge, told investigators that Davern's room "had the appearance of being unused." Walken and Wagner spent the night on Splendour .

T he next morning, according to Linda Winkler, a day clerk at the Pavilion Lodge, Wood "looked fine but seemed somewhat disoriented." Winkler told police on November 30, 1981, that "during [their] conversation Ms. Wood had asked where she could catch boat transportation back to the mainland and [Winkler] had directed Ms. Wood to the proper location. Ms. Winkler further told investigators she'd been amazed at the fact that a movie star like Ms. Wood would be taking public transportation back to the mainland."

Then Wood changed her mind. With middle age, she had become particularly self-conscious about her appearance. Though still beautiful, she had complained to Lana about the accumulating years: "I'm fighting every damn one." Perhaps more important, she didn't want to abandon Walken, who was still aboard Splendour , so she and Davern returned to the yacht.

Walken told police that "he was awakened the next morning by Natalie, and she made some remark about she was going to take the sea plane back and wanted to know if he was staying. He recalled making the statement to her, 'I'm not in this.'"

So Wood went to work rustling up a big breakfast of huevos rancheros for everyone. "Everyone acted like nothing happened," Davern recalls, "and everything was beautiful again."

A t around 11 A.M., R.J. took the boat up to Isthmus Cove, at the other end of the island. Out on the water, Walken told police, "Robert Wagner was trying to talk him into doing some fishing and setting up some fishing poles. He [Walken] recalled R.J. thanking him for smoothing everything over."

After they arrived that afternoon in Isthmus Cove, Davern recalled, Wood sat in the main salon and read while he, Wagner, and Walken went to their staterooms to take naps. After Walken woke up, he and Wood went ashore in Valiant, settled into Doug's Harbor Reef, and began drinking. Sometime later Wagner and Davern took the water taxi to shore and joined them.

Davern says now that when they arrived Walken and Wood "were out of it—giggling and laughing. Me and R.J. are pretty sober— we don't drink around the clock."

Michelle Mileski, a waitress at the restaurant, told police on November 29, 1981, that Wagner and Davern had preceded Walken and Wood at the bar. Then when Wagner made reservations for an early dinner, Wood had expressed dissatisfaction with the wine list, stating, "We could go shopping on the Splendour and get our own wine." Davern remembers that he and Walken returned to Splendour for that purpose. Aboard Valiant, Davern says, he and Walken smoked a joint, so when they returned to the restaurant with some wine, he felt "right in tune with Christopher and Natalie—high as a kite."

The party's waitress, Tina Quinn, told police in a November 29, 1981, interview that "during this dinner party [the Wagner foursome] consumed the two bottles of wine and that [one of the men] had been drinking daiquiris, further she remembered that other parties in the bar had bought two bottles of champagne for the Wagner party. During the meal she said the victim did not eat much of her dinner and was doing a lot of the complaining about small things such as there was too much light on the table, the table was too big, the fish was not fresh, and it appeared to the witness that the victim was not in the best of moods. Ms. Quinn recalled an incident where she saw the victim throw a water glass to the floor.... As they were starting to leave she recalled Robert Wagner lifting a large dark colored jacket and she felt it was being used as a shield because the victim appeared to be stumbling slightly. She then recalled all of the Wagner party leaving together and it was her opinion they were not in the best of moods. She clarified this statement saying that throughout the evening the victim appeared to be in changing moods, sometimes laughing and sometimes solemn."

Don Whiting, the restaurant manager, recalled for police, also on November 29, 1981, that "he thought at the time there was some possible problems between Robert Wagner and his wife, the victim. He remembered some glass was broken, possibly thrown. He was of the impression that Robert Wagner was a little bit irritated with his wife."

Walken later explained away the brokenglass incident to police by saying, "It was my fault. I was making a toast while drinking. At the conclusion of this toast, I threw my glass to the floor as I always do. I remember Natalie, and I think everybody else, did the same."

Whatever the reason, it wasn't the first time Wood had broken a wineglass when angered or upset. According to Lana Wood, Natalie had crushed a crystal glass in her hand the day that Wagner had left the house after the demise of their first marriage. She re-created the gesture in the television drama The Affair in a scene in which Wagner's character abandons her.

Davern recalls today that throughout dinner Wood "was definitely flirting with [Walken]. They were like all giggling and touching. She was excited by Christopher— here's this good-looking guy." Wood didn't want to return to the boat after dinner, Davern says.

Both William Peterson, the shore-boat operator, and Kurt Craig, in the harbor-patrol office, told police that they watched the Wagner party board Valiant and motor back to their yacht. Craig later told police that as the four were descending the ramp to the dinghy "what he described as a scream [came] from the female. He thought she may have been drunk and was unhappy at something that happened at the restaurant."

A t his press conference Thomas Noguchi stated that, according to information he had obtained from police investigators, a "nonviolent argument" had occurred aboard the yacht just prior to Wood's disappearance. This electrified the media.

To quell the ensuing rumors, Robert Wagner put out his version of the final hours. This is how it's quoted in the 1986 hagiography Heart to Heart with Robert Wagner:

We reached the boat in a happy frame of mind after spending a few hours at the restaurant eating and drinking. During dinner, I got into a political debate with Walken and we continued it aboard the yacht. There was no fight, no anger. Just a lot of words thrown around like you hear in most political discussions such as "you don't know what you are talking about!" Natalie sat there not saying much of anything and looking bored. She left us after about a half hour, and we sat there talking for almost another hour. Then I went to kiss her good night, and found her missing.

Wagner goes on to theorize about how Wood had gotten into the water:

It was only after I was told that she was dressed in a sleeping gown, heavy socks, and a parka that it dawned on me what had really occurred. Natalie obviously had trouble sleeping with that dinghy slamming up against the boat. It happened many, many times before, and I had always gone out and pulled the ropes tighter to keep the dinghy flush against the yacht. She probably skidded on one of the steps after untying the ropes. The steps are slick as ice because of the algae and seaweed that's always clinging to them. After slipping on the steps, she hit her head against the boat.... I only hope she was unconscious when she hit the water.

Wagner's two interviews with police were even less detailed. In the first, at 9:54 on the morning of the tragedy, he stated simply that "they were in the Salon when victim [Wood] went below to her bedroom. Shortly after they noticed she and the [Valiant] were missing." Since Wagner "was in an emotional state," the interview was terminated almost immediately. In the somewhat more detailed December 4 interview, Wagner related only that "after they were aboard awhile, Natalie went down to bed and at this point in time, he recalled Chris Walken stepping out on deck for awhile. When Chris returned inside the salon, they continued talking. He estimated approximately 15 minutes passed. When he went to check on Natalie he noticed she was gone."

When the police pressed Wagner "as to the discussion they had had prior to her going to bed," he told them "it was about her being away from home and the kids so much_He missed her being around."

When questioned about the broken glass which police investigators had found in the main salon of Splendour in their search of the boat that began at 12:45 P.M. the day of the tragedy, Wagner explained that "it was probably from the rough seas."

Davern, in his December 10 police interview, was a bit more forthcoming, but not much: "He recalled that RJ and Natalie got into a discussion about her being gone and how RJ missed her. During the discussion Chris Walken entered into it, supporting Natalie's views. He felt RJ was getting upset over this and Chris Walken getting up and going outside around this time. Natalie went to the master stateroom to go to bed. Chris Walken came back into the main salon and he was going to bed. Here this was normal procedure for Natalie. In the evening she would just leave, prepare herself for bed, and usually return after ten or fifteen minutes to say goodnight.... After some time past [SIC], he stated, RJ went to see where Natalie was. When they noticed she was gone, about the same time they noticed the [Valiant] was gone."

Today, however, Davern tells a different and darker story: Back on board, he says, he offered to make tea for everyone. "While the tea is brewing, the wine is flowing. We opened another bottle [probably Wood's favorite, Pouilly-Fuissé]. Then Natalie lit her beeswax candles. R.J. was drinking scotch by then, and I joined him. So we're sitting there, and Chris and Natalie are giggling and carrying on, the same as before, totally forgetting that me and R.J. are there. I'm saying to myself, Oh my God, this is getting to be too much right now.

"All of a sudden," Davern says, "R.J. grabbed a bottle of wine and smashes it right on the table in front of them. Glass goes flying all over. '"Jesus Christ,' R.J. says to Christopher, 'what are you trying to do, fuck my wife?'

"Christopher got up in two or three seconds and headed right out the door. Now Natalie says, 'I'm not standing for this a minute longer!' She goes down to her stateroom and slams her door. Christopher goes right down to his stateroom. Now I'm left alone with R.J. I say, 'R.J., let's just calm down.' We stayed up there for a little while, then R.J. says, 'I'm going to go down there and see Natalie.'"

Davern says that as he remained on the bridge, located right over the Wagners' stateroom, he could hear the couple "fighting like crazy.... I'd never in a million years seen them fight like that before. I just couldn't believe it.... You know, stuff getting thrown around." It was, according to Davern, a ferocious argument fueled by drink—"so hot and heavy that it got carried out into the cockpit" at the rear of the yacht. Davern says he next heard "the dinghy being untied— you can hear the ropes, the bowline being tugged on."

And then, Davern says, there was silence. It seemed like a long time to him before Wagner, "tousled, sweating profusely, as if he had been in a terrible fight, an ordeal of some kind," came back up to the bridge, where the two men emptied another bottle of wine.

Davern says that it was about 11:30 when Wagner returned. "We were up there drinking until 1:$0 in the morning. Then R.J. said, 'I'd better go back down and check on Natalie.'"

After a few minutes, Wagner appeared and told the captain, "She's gone."

"She's gone? Where the hell is she?"

"I don't know."

Davern decided to go look for her. "I thought maybe she went into my stateroom, feeling she could confide in me. So I went up and she's not there. So I looked in the empty stateroom—nothing. I look in Christopher's stateroom. He's in the top bunk and he's asleep. I looked in his bathroom, and thank God she's not in Christopher's room. I knew that wouldn't happen, because there's too much rage going on. So I go back up and say, 'She's not down below.'"

Davern walked out on deck to look for her, and that's when he noticed that Valiant was gone.

Davern was baffled. He believes that if Wood had decided to return to shore at night he would certainly have been asked to go with her. "If the stars aren't out, it's total darkness. There's no place to go. Darkness all around. I wouldn't go out on [Valiant] at night."

Davern says he then told Wagner that he was going to turn on Splendour' s floodlights in order to look for her, but Wagner told him not to: "Dennis, don't turn that on." Davern then offered to fire up the yacht's engines and cruise around looking for Wood. According to Davern, Wagner refused.

"Don't do that. Let's think about this. We don't want to do anything, Dennis, because we don't want to alert all these people," Davern says Wagner told him.

W ith the police report, we at last have Christopher Walken's description of the crucial hours preceding the tragedy. It is a story closer to Davern's than to Wagner's. In the first of his two interviews, at 10 on the morning of the tragedy, he told police, "After they were aboard the boat he and Robert Wagner got into a small beef. He left the cabin and went outside on deck for a few minutes, when he returned victim [Wood] was sitting there and she seemed to be disturbed. He recalled she then went to her room and he thought she had gone to bed. He next remembered the captain dennis make [sic] a remark 'the dinghy is gone.'"

Walken's more detailed, December 3 interview produced this version:

They were in the salon talking; he [Walken] stated they had all been drinking and they had one of those conversation [sic] going were [sic]—and he used the reference—"you put all your cards on the table." RJ was making statements and complaining that she was away from home too much. She was away from the kids, it was hurting their home life. Mr. Walken stated he also got involved with discussion supporting the victim's views—she was an actress, she was an important person, this was her life. He suddenly realized he was violating his own view about getting involved in an argument between a man and a wife. He stepped outside for some air and when he returned, everybody was apologizing, particularly Robert Wagner and everything seemed fine.

D uane Rasure is a big man—six feet three— who dresses like a cowboy now that he's in retirement from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, Homicide Bureau. He and his wife, Joy, live in a remote town in Arizona called Eagar. Rasure still wears a belt buckle that proudly displays the number 187, the number of the section of California's penal code for murder. When he got the call to investigate the Wood drowning, he had been a homicide detective for 11 years. He and his partner had helped break the case of the Hillside Strangler in the late 70s.

"They called me about 8:30 in the morning. They told me I got the case of Natalie Wood drowning in Catalina, which surprised me. The news threw my wife into shock, and from then on it was a matter of getting dressed, heading for the heliport, where I was transported to Catalina to do my investigation."

Twenty minutes after Rasure's arrival, a helicopter brought Wagner and Walken to the sheriff's office on the island. "I introduced myself and my partner [Roy Hamilton] to Wagner, and told him what we were going to do. I could see he's at a loss. He's just in trouble. He's hurting. It took just a short time to get a general idea of what had happened. It seemed accidental from the first, probably because of the way I got the information—the way it was presented: 'Someone fell overboard and drowned.' Nothing in the world would make us think at the time that there might have been something suspicious."

Rasure would soon feel the pressure of the investigation. He started getting calls from old friends who knew he'd been assigned to the case. Quite a few tough homicide detectives were touched by Wood's death. "They would call me up," Rasure recalls, "and say, 'Duane, tell me what happened. I loved that girl. I watched her grow up.'"

A week after the drowning, at one in the afternoon on December 4, Rasure visited Wagner's home in Beverly Hills in order to question the actor a second time. "The first time I interviewed him he was just as cooperative as could be," Rasure recalls. "But I didn't get enough information at the heliport. So I went to interview him again, and his attorney says, 'I don't think so. I think you have enough.'

"At that time, we had a sheriff who was a very powerful man here," Rasure explains. "We went to lunch, and I told him I was having this little handicap, this little problem with this attorney, and he says, 'Oh.' I had my appointment [with R.J.] the following day."

Rasure arrived and was taken upstairs. Wagner was in bed during the entire interview, with his lawyer Paul Ziffren in the room. "I let him tell me what happened, going into more detail." Once again, Rasure was satisfied. Roy Hamilton would tell the Los Angeles Times that "we talked to Wagner and Walken and there was no indication that there was any argument." (This is rather astonishing, considering the police interviews with Walken.)

Despite the fact that there were obvious inconsistencies in the testimony of the three principal witnesses, the police investigation was closed on December 11, less than two weeks after the tragedy, with the conclusion of "accidental drowning." Rasure, who subscribes to the theory that Wood slipped while trying to retie the dinghy, says, however, that he doesn't really know for sure what happened to the actress.

"I can't tell you exactly how she got in the water," he says today.

A s a witness, Dennis Davern presents many problems. The first is why he didn't initially tell police the version he tells today, rather than letting it out piecemeal to journalists and tabloids over the almost 20 years that followed.

Davern claims that in the days after the tragedy he became a virtual prisoner in Wagner's Beverly Hills home: at first, he and R.J. would wake around 10 each morning and "cry on each other's shoulders, with a scotch glass in one hand and an arm around each other." After several weeks, however, it slowly dawned on Davern, he says, that it would be very difficult to leave. He had a girlfriend he wanted to visit, and he began to wonder when and how he could go see her. She had already come to the house and had been rebuffed, he alleges. "When the alarm system kicked in at night, you couldn't even open your door. It was like being in a vault. The first night I was there, I wanted to go downstairs to watch television, but I couldn't get out.... There was no phone in the room. I couldn't walk out the front doorsomebody was always there, usually R.J.'s bodyguard. I felt really closed in."

"In the daytime," Davern says, "I would go downstairs and the staff would say, 'Let me make you some drinks, Dennis.' I'd go to the bar, pour a scotch, and R.J. would be up in his bedroom. It was like this for three months."

"When I look back on it," Davern now says, "I was a pure idiot. I had turned into a real drunk. I felt that I was a part of R.J., that he was going to make sure that Dennis was O.K."

Davern says that Wagner went as far as to bring him to his own psychotherapy sessions. "I was having dreams like crazy. I'd wake up with some weird dreams. And R.J. said, 'Dennis, I'm having bad dreams, too.' So R.J. and I would go to his shrink together. We would sit down, sometimes in the same session, sometimes alone."

O n December 2, 1981, Wood was buried in Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery while a balalaika played softly under the warm afternoon sun. Robert Wagner plucked gardenias from Natalie's casket, handing one each to Wood's mother, to her sisters, and to her daughters. Then he bent down and kissed the gold-trimmed white coffin.

After the funeral, Davern says, reporters began tailing him, trying to get his story by posing as potential boat buyers or by luring him with beautiful women. He claims one tabloid offered him $200,000. When Davern told Wagner about the offer, Davern recalls, he cautioned him, "Dennis, they're never going to pay you." He further warned Davern that the F.B.I. would be asking him questions, and Natalie's fans would be after him. "So I was cut off from everybody.... They said they were protecting me."

Wagner got Davern into the Screen Actors Guild, Davern says, and although Davern had never acted before in his life, he started getting small roles on commercials and on Hart to Hart. "He [Wagner] used to give me checks," Davern recalls, "a thousand, two thousand. My friends said it was hush money and that R.J. wouldn't want anything to do with me after Splendour was gone. I used to tell them that R.J. wasn't like that, that he was a real friend to me."

Davern eventually decided to get his yacht broker's license and live on the boat while he tried to sell it for R.J. It was his way, he felt at the time, to escape finally from R.J.'s protective scrutiny. "I took the boat somewhere where nobody would know it. I had a friend up in Oxnard who had a house with a dock in the back. So I took the Splendour up there. But nobody wanted anything to do with this yacht. It had become a bastard boat." Wagner ended up donating it to the Sea Scouts, a youth boating club.

O nce Splendour and Wagner were out of his life, Davern made his way back to South Florida. In the intervening years, the former sea captain has resurfaced periodically to try to tell his version of what happened that night. He has not been his own best advocate, holding back information and implying that he knows more than he's saying. He sold part of his story to the Globe ("World Exclusive, NATALIE WOOD, the Shocking Truth About Her Death"), revealing that an argument occurred with Walken in the salon, but not revealing the alleged details and severity of the subsequent argument between Wagner and Wood in their stateroom.

There was also a disastrous appearance on Geraldo Rivera's Now It Can Be Told in 1992, 10 years after the drowning, in which Rasure and Davern were asked to give their account of what happened that night for a "jury" comprising Raoul Felder and two other trial lawyers. By now Davern was writing a book about his experiences, and he arrived at the television studio with his coauthor, a longtime friend named Margaret "Marti" Rulli. But he found the interview hard going, and he interrupted it several times so he could confer with Rulli offcamera. Then Davern was prompted, "They were yelling and screaming at each other to get off the boat ..." He responded, "Oh God, I don't know if I can tell them that or not." Rulli, exasperated, replied, "Ten years of this, Dennis! This needs to be cleared up! We have to say how she got in the water, Den." But Rulli changed her mind—or perhaps just realized how stubborn Davern could be—and she said, "Don't you tell them how she got into the water.... We put that in the book and we'll make billions from it."

Without their knowledge, Davern and Rulli were being filmed in their unguarded moments "off-camera," and that's what was televised on Now It Can Be Told. Rivera then essentially dismissed Davern's testimony as compromised, but asked his panel of lawyers to comment anyway. All three agreed: the important fact was that Davern modified his police testimony, which almost always warrants a new investigation. Their unanimous verdict: reopen the case.

After the taping, Wagner sent Davern a letter warning him not to discuss the matter further.

Davern and Rulli also pounded the sidewalks trying to sell their manuscript to New York publishers. Davern says, "We went up to this publishing house and they said, 'Who's your agent?' They must have thought we were total jerks! Nothing ever came of it. But it's a good thing it never worked out—I never even told Marti the whole story."

One former book editor, who met with the two, remembers being "chilled and intrigued by their tale, but we didn't see how they could stretch it out into a full-length book. Also, we wondered where was the backup for his story. It was basically his word against Wagner's."

I n Coroner, Noguchi admitted he had trouble with Wagner's theory that Wood was bothered by the noise of the dinghy striking the side of the boat and slipped into the water while trying to retie it. "I found that theory plausible," wrote Noguchi, "particularly because it explained her nightgown-and-socks apparel. And yet there was a possible flaw. The dinghy was rubber, and, according to Paul Miller, our expert who owned a similar boat [which by another curious coincidence in the case was moored to the same buoy, in front of Splendour, the night Wood died], a rubber dinghy makes little or no noise when it strikes a yacht." (But, Noguchi allowed, "silence is relative.... Other sailors say that the noise might be amplified to an annoying degree.")

In addition, Noguchi wrote, "forensic evidence, such as the fingernail scratches on the side of the dinghy, the brush-type abrasion on her cheek, and the untouched algae on the swim step, seemed to indicate that she was trying to board the dinghy, not just adjust its rope, when the accident happened."

In the end, Noguchi, like Rasure, is not really sure how and why Wood ended up in the water. Perhaps Noguchi knows more than he is telling, thanks to his unreleased "psychological autopsy." In a brief phone interview, he claims the document could be found with both the police report and the autopsy report. Scott Carrier, the information officer at the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office, says, "I have no idea where that report would be. Everything that was in the Natalie Wood file was sent to you. We have no additional reports."

Davern says he has stopped trying to make money off his tale. He claims he recently turned down a $50,000 offer from a tabloid, although he still hopes the book he began writing many years ago about his life with the Wagners might one day be published. "I think she deserves an explanation for her death," he says. He still has dreams about being aboard Splendour. He's married now and raising three young children on a quiet street in a small Florida town, where he paints and restores boats. He named his first child Natasha.

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New Doubts in Natalie Wood’s Death: ‘I Don’t Think She Got in the Water by Herself’

By Maya Salam

• Feb. 3, 2018

New witness statements have re-energized the investigation into the drowning of Natalie Wood, the child star turned Hollywood icon who disappeared off a yacht over Thanksgiving weekend in 1981.

Ms. Wood went missing late on Nov. 28 from the yacht Splendour. On board were her television star husband, Robert Wagner, the actor Christopher Walken and the boat’s captain.

The men spent hours searching for her before alerting the Coast Guard. Her body was found, shoeless and wearing only a nightgown and red parka, in a rocky cove near Santa Catalina Island off the coast of Los Angeles on Nov. 29. She was 43.

Originally ruled an accident, her death was recently reclassified as “suspicious.”

“She got in the water somehow, and I don’t think she got in the water by herself,” Lt. John Corina of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department told Erin Moriarty, a CBS correspondent, in a special “48 Hours” report to be broadcast on Saturday.

Accounts from the boat’s captain, Dennis Davern, who has maintained he witnessed an explosive, alcohol-fueled fight between Ms. Wood and Mr. Wagner immediately before her disappearance, have long stoked speculation of foul play.

Investigators said they have two new witnesses who support Mr. Davern’s account, according to “48 Hours.”

“A witness provided details about hearing yelling and crashing sounds coming from the couple’s stateroom,” according to a statement from the Los Angeles Sheriff Department.

The statement added: “Shortly afterwards, separate witnesses identified a man and a woman arguing on the back of the boat. The witnesses believed that the voices belonged to Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner.”

The statement did not elaborate on where the witnesses were at the time or their identities.

Mr. Wagner is not a suspect but “more of a person of interest now,” Lieutenant Corina told Ms. Moriarty.

Investigators also told “48 Hours” that bruises noted on Ms. Wood’s autopsy report suggested she may have been struck.

“She looked like the victim of an assault,” said another investigator, Detective Ralph Hernandez.

Thirty years after her death, the case was reopened by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department because of new information, but Lieutenant Corina did not offer more specific details at the time. In 2012, the cause on her death certificate was changed to “drowning and other undetermined factors” from “accidental drowning.”

Mr. Wagner, who turns 88 next week, has not spoken to investigators since they reopened the case but has maintained that Ms. Wood’s death was an accident.

Mr. Walken has spoken with investigators since 2011, Ms. Moriarty told “ CBS This Morning” on Friday .

Representatives for Mr. Wagner and Mr. Walken did not respond to requests for comment on Friday.

By age 9, Ms. Wood had her breakthrough role in the movie “Miracle on 34th Street.”

Over the next 15 years, she starred in “West Side Story,” “Rebel Without a Cause,” “Splendor in the Grass” and “Love With a Proper Stranger.” She earned an Oscar nomination for each of the last three, solidifying her leading-lady status. Dozens of movies and television shows followed.

In a 1969 interview with The New York Times in Las Vegas, the reporter John Hallowell painted an image of Ms. Wood replete with money, glamour and romance. Sitting at a blackjack table, clad in a silver lamé minidress and a sable fur, Ms. Wood was “stuffing her winnings into a gold egg,” he wrote.

At that point in her life, Ms. Wood was between marriages to Mr. Wagner, the handsome star of television shows like “It Takes a Thief,” “Switch” and “Hart to Hart.” They married in 1957 and divorced in 1962. In a lawsuit she filed, she charged Mr. Wagner with “mental cruelties.”

She married the British film producer Richard Gregson in 1969 and divorced him in 1972, the same year she remarried Mr. Wagner on a boat off the coast of Southern California, even though she feared the ocean.

“I’ve always been terrified, still am, of water, dark water, seawater,” she famously said.

The Los Angeles medical examiner, Thomas Noguchi, in 1981 called her death “a tragic accident while slightly intoxicated.”

While Ms. Wood’s body was found alongside the Splendour’s dinghy — she reportedly took the dinghy out alone sometimes — Dr. Noguchi said that she had likely not gotten into it the day she died.

Despite their woes, Mr. Wagner and Ms. Wood — born Natalia Zakharenko to Russian and Ukrainian immigrant parents — were an aspirational celebrity couple. She’d admitted to having a teenage crush on Mr. Wagner, who was eight years older, and in her Times interview in 1969, she reflected on their relationship.

“We loved each other tremendously,” she said. “It was disillusioning when it didn’t work out.”

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Hawaii News | Rearview Mirror

Rearview mirror: how natalie wood’s yacht reached hawaii and more.

• By Bob Sigall, Special to the Star-Advertiser
• April 3, 2020

STAR-ADVERTISER / 1981

Natalie Wood died on or near her yacht, the Splendour, while on a weekend outing to Catalina island. The boat spent its last 24 years in Hawaii.

This week I thought I’d respond to several questions readers have asked me. One is about the boat that Natalie Wood died on or near, which ended up in Hawaii. Read more

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Before I jump into this week’s column, I want to say that I never thought last week’s Rearview Mirror article about toilet paper would have the impact it had.

The Washington Post excerpted it Sunday, and the BBC World News interviewed me about it Tuesday. Maybe toilet paper is the common denominator of our culture, the thing that brings us all together.

Moving on … This week I thought I’d respond to several questions readers have asked me. One is about the boat that Natalie Wood died on or near, which ended up in Hawaii. The next is about whether Hawaii was the first place in the U.S. to sell Honda automobiles.

I’ll also write about the Christmas tree guy, Richard Tajiri, and a particular location at Kahala Mall.

THE SPLENDOUR

An anonymous reader asked about actress Natalie Wood, who drowned off Catalina island on Nov. 29, 1981. Her family yacht, the Splendour, ended up in Hawaii. It was named after her 1961 movie, “Splendor in the Grass.”

“What is the story behind how it came to be in Hawaii?” the reader asked. Did Natalie Wood’s fateful voyage take place in Hawaii?

The Splendour had been in Hawaii for many years and was recently demolished.

Natalie Wood (born Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko) began acting at age 4, and by 25 already had garnered three Oscar nominations,

Wood was 43 in 1981 when she; husband Robert Wagner; their two daughters, 7 and 11; captain Dennis Davern; and actor Christopher Walken took a weekend boat trip to Catalina island, off the coast of Los Angeles. Wood was making a film with Walken at the time.

They dined ashore and returned to the yacht. Wood retired to the bedroom. Walken and Wagner got into an argument. Afterward, Wagner could not find Wood and called the Coast Guard. They found her body a mile away at 8 a.m.

Wagner believed Wood had been trying to secure a rubber dinghy, which was banging against the 60-foot yacht in the middle of the night, and slipped and drowned. Walken also believes that her death was an accident.

Los Angeles Coroner Thomas Noguchi found no evidence of foul play, although suspicions have continued ever since. Her blood alcohol level was high at 0.14.

Ron Nelson bought the Splendour in 1986 at a Long Beach auction and brought it to Kewalo Basin in Hawaii around 1996, where he spent a lot of time and money refurbishing the wooden boat.

Los Angeles sheriffs decided in 2011 to reopen the investigation into Wood’s death and asked to see the yacht. CBS also came and filmed a “48 Hours” mystery show on her death.

Nelson said he was planning on chartering the boat, and the publicity came at a good time.

In 2020 the Splendour, then at the Ala Wai, had racked up over $12,000 in mooring fees and was in poor condition and in danger of sinking. The boat was impounded in December and demolished in January, ending the 60-year saga of the Splendour.

It’s interesting to me that, in so many ways, national and international news stories often have a Hawaii connection.

FIRST IN THE NATION?

Doug Oda of Pacific Honda (formerly Pflueger Honda) told me they have claimed to be the “nation’s first Honda dealer.” But is it true, he asked? He wasn’t sure.

I went back and searched the newspaper archives. One article I found said that the first Honda automobile sold on the mainland was in May 1970.

However … the first Honda automobile for sale in Hawaii appears to be in 1969.

A Sept. 20, 1969, Honolulu Advertiser article on the Honda 600 says it is “available in white and red at local Honda distributors.” The car had a two-cylinder overhead cam, 38-horsepower engine. It had a top speed of 75 mph and got 40 mpg.

A Dec. 28, 1969, article says that “Pflueger Lincoln- Mercury has the exclusive dealership in Hawaii” for the Honda 600.

Jimmy Pflueger began Pflueger Lincoln-Mercury in 1964 at 1409 Kapiolani Blvd. (near Ala Moana Center). Pflueger Honda was founded in 1969 at 3233 Nimitz Highway near the airport.

I told Oda a few months ago that my conclusion is that Pflueger was the first in the U.S. to sell Honda automobiles. Recently, he said Honda in Japan went through their records and confirmed it.

Oda told me the first Honda 600s sent to Hawaii had seats that didn’t move. Owner Jimmy Pflueger, who was well over 6 feet tall, could not fit. He told Honda that Americans had longer legs than Asians and that he could not sell the cars just to people with short legs.

Honda suggested he destroy them rather than send them back, and Oda heard they may have been dumped offshore in the ocean. Seats on the next shipment could move forward and back.

TOWER RECORDS

Joyann wrote, “I seem to remember a restaurant in the space before Tower Records opened at Kahala Mall. Am I crazy?”

The location is now a Christ Centered Community Church.

Tower Records opened in Kahala Mall in June 1993. It was on the second floor above California Pizza Kitchen. Tower Records also had stores in Aiea and on Keeaumoku Street.

Tory Laitila remembered one restaurant at Kahala Mall in the spot prior to Tower Records: Chi-Chi’s Mexican Grill, around 1986. It served Sonoran-style food that was subtly seasoned rather than spicy.

The menu included tacos, fajitas, enchiladas, burritos and a $5.95 lunch buffet.

Two more restaurants occupied the site after Chi-Chi’s: Country Kitchen in 1990 and Pasta Pub in 1992.

Before that it was McInerny’s on the second floor when Kahala Mall opened in 1969, next to Liberty House and Carol & Mary’s.

RICHARD TAJIRI

Another reader asked about Richard Tajiri, the Christmas tree guy. Tajiri died in January at age 78. He brought Christmas trees to the islands for 43 years from Oregon and Washington.

Wailuku-born Tajiri married Paula in 1983 and moved to the mainland. They owned Japanese restaurants in Oregon and Washington, but Christmas trees were always his top priority. He had lots in town, Aiea, Kailua and other locations.

His goal was to sell Christmas trees for 50 years, and the family decided to keep the business going for another seven years to get him across the finish line,

The Rearview Mirror Insider is Bob Sigall’s now twice-weekly free email newsletter that gives readers behind-the-scenes background, stories that wouldn’t fit in the column and lots of interesting details. I invite you to join in and be an Insider at RearviewMirrorInsider.com . Mahalo!

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Natalie Wood Mystery: Who is Yacht Captain Dennis Davern?

Life looks like it's been hard for Dennis Davern, the captain of the yacht on which Natalie Wood spent her last night 30 years ago.

He has a crinkly, sun-scarred face out of which sprouts an uneven beard of brown and gray. He wore glasses on the “Today” show interview and donned an olive-colored cargo shirt with two unbuttoned breast pockets. He appeared as if he might have just skippered a charter cruise, and was returning after an afternoon under an unforgiving sun. He wore a white tee-shirt under his cargo attire and an ill-fitting cap.

Pressed by "Today" host David Gregory Friday morning about his claims, 30 years after the fact, that Robert Wagner was responsible for Wood's death, Davern's responses were clipped and choppy.

“Was the fight between Natalie Wood and her husband Robert Wagner what ultimately led to her death?” Gregory asked.

“Yes,” Davern replied. But he would go no further.

More On This...

• Natalie Wood: 1938-1981
• Yacht Captain: Robert Wagner Responsible for Death of Natalie Wood
• Book Triggers Reopening of Natalie Wood Case as a Homicide Investigation, Report Says

So who is the New Jersey native who captained the yacht, Splendour, on the night Wood went missing? And is he, as Gregory postulated, a calculating “opportunist,” out to sell copies of his book, with a flair for revisionist history and well-timed revelations?

“Dennis Davern, born and raised in New Jersey, was honorably discharged from the U.S. Navy in 1971,” reads a bio for the book about Wood's death he co-authored. “A marina job took him to California where he became a boat captain for Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood. From 1982 to 1984 he was a member of the Screen Actors Guild and employed as a general extra actor in Hollywood . Since 1987, he has owned and operated a successful marina and boat maintenance business in Florida.”

Davern wrote the book, “Goodbye Natalie, Goodbye Splendour,” with a friend from New Jersey, Marti Rulli, with whom he appeared on “Today." On Rulli’s blog, she writes that the book, “is the poignant story of a young, cavalier adventurer, Dennis Davern, who landed the position of Splendour Captain, and how the Wagner family welcomed him into their hearts and home.”

Young. Cavalier. Adventurer. Charged words, to be sure, chosen by Rulli, in what is perhaps an attempt to explain away the “mistakes” for which Davern says he so much regrets having made on the night of  Nov. 28, 1981.

The following comes from the book, which reveals that it was Davern -- and not Wagner or fellow passenger Christopher Walken -- who identified Wood’s lifeless body after it was retrieved from the water.

“Natalie Wood's husband, Robert Wagner, and their boat captain, Dennis Davern, had been waiting aboard the Wagners' yacht, Splendour, for word from the search crews since 1:30 a.m. when Wagner had announced over Splendour's radio, "Someone is missing from our boat."”

Robert Wagner declined to view his wife's body when a small group of officials boarded Splendour to inform him of the grim discovery. Wagner dropped his head, and with emotion and drama, cried out, "She's gone, she's gone, oh, God, she's gone. Why?"

Dennis Davern embraced Robert Wagner, as if to keep him from falling over.

"Will you please identify her for me, Dennis? I can't, I just can't," Wagner pleaded. The extraordinary request seemed to deepen everyone's compassion for Wagner, but no one considered, even briefly, that the terrible task of identifying Natalie Wood's body would haunt Dennis for the rest of his life.”

Since his morning show appearance, Davern has denied he is making his revelations for money. Wagner's rep has issued a statement welcoming any investigation that could provide further details on Wood's untimely death.

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A Complete Timeline of Natalie Wood's Mysterious Death

The events are re-examined in HBO's new documentary, Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind .

There are few Hollywood mysteries more enduring—or more heartbreaking—than the one surrounding Natalie Wood's tragic death.

Below, a timeline of the known events of Wood's passing, which remains cloaked in mystery to this day.

Late November 1981

After Thanksgiving 1981, Wood and Wagner began planning one of their frequent boat trips to Catalina Island, off the coast of California. According to several interviews in Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind , the actress invited multiple friends to join them on the trip, but most of the invitees declined, citing the less-than-ideal sailing weather that weekend. Wood's Brainstorm costar, Christopher Walken, who was in town for the film, but not from Los Angeles, was the only person to accepted, joining Wood, Wagner, and Dennis Davern, the captain of the couple's yacht, Splendour .

November 28, 1981

Wood, Wagner, Walken, and Davern enjoyed a champagne-filled dinner at the restaurant Doug's Harbor Reef in Catalina before re-boarding the yacht for the evening. Don Whiting, the night manager of the restaurant, later said he was worried that all four were too intoxicated to make it back to the boat safely in their dinghy after the meal and even went so far as to ask Kurt Craig of the Harbor Patrol to make sure the group made it safely back to their yacht when they left the restaurant at 10:30 p.m. The toxicology report released after Wood's death revealed that the actress had a blood alcohol content of 0.14 percent at the time of her death.

In the HBO documentary, Wagner describes having a heated conversation with Walken after dinner, during which Wood was not present, but believed to be safe elsewhere onboard.

At around 11:05 p.m. that evening, other passengers realized that Wood had gone missing and began looking for her. Around this time, they realized that the boat's dinghy was also gone.

November 29, 1981

At 1:30 a.m., a ship-to-shore call was made and two hours later, at 3:30 a.m., the Coast Guard was finally called . This part of the timeline has become of particular interest to investigators.

"There are many, many things that should be examined, but mainly the four-hour wait to call for the Coast Guard," Marti Rulli, co-author of the book, Goodbye Natalie, Goodbye Splendour previously told CNN .

At around 8 a.m., Wood's body was found about a mile south of the couple's yacht, off an isolated cove known as Blue Cavern Point.

November 30, 1981

Dr. Joseph Choi, a deputy medical examiner at the Los Angeles Medical Examiner’s Office performed an autopsy on Wood. Noting Wood's blood alcohol levels and several bruises on her arms, legs, and face, believed to be consistent with a fall overboard while she was trying to board the dinghy, the office ruled the death an accident, according to Huffington Post .

September 1, 1997

Walken broke his silence on the night of Wood's death, offering a theory as to how she died. The actor's account of the evening, given during an interview with Playboy Magazine , was consistent with investigators' initial findings.

In the interview, Walken said, per The Hollywood Reporter :

"Anybody there saw the logistics—of the boat, the night, where we were, that it was raining—and would know exactly what happened. You hear about things happening to people—they slip in the bathtub, fall down the stairs, step off the curb in London because they think that the cars come the other way—and they die. You feel you want to die making an effort at something; you don’t want to die in some unnecessary way.

"What happened that night only she knows, because she was alone. She had gone to bed before us, and her room was at the back. A dinghy was bouncing against the side of the boat, and I think she went out to move it. There was a ski ramp that was partially in the water. It was slippery—I had walked on it myself. She had told me she couldn’t swim; in fact, they had to cut a swimming scene from [ Brainstorm ]. She was probably half asleep, and she was wearing a coat."

November 17, 2011

Thirty years after her death, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department reopened their investigation after receiving "additional information" from unidentified sources who contacted the authorities.

November 18, 2011

In an interview with NBC's Today, Davern said he lied about Wood's death when he was originally questioned by police. He also claimed that Wagner was actually responsible for the tragedy.

January 14, 2013

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department officially changed Wood's cause of death from an accidental drowning to "drowning and other undetermined factors." The change came after investigators determined that some of the bruises found on Wood's body during her initial autopsy may have been sustained before she drowned. However, coroners said they couldn't definitely confirm when exactly the bruises were inflicted.

February 1, 2018

Wagner was officially named as a person of interest in Wood's death for the first time. Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department Lieutenant John Corina disclosed the update during an interview with CBS News' 48 Hours .

In Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind , her daughter, Natasha Gregson Wagner, confronts Wagner on-camera about speculation that he had something to do with Wood's death. He denied the accusations and Gregson Wagner offered her emphatic support, stressing that she does not believe he was involved in her mother's death in anyway.

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Watch CBS News

Natalie Wood death: Investigator calls new witnesses "very credible"

By Erin Moriarty

Updated on: February 3, 2018 / 11:09 PM EST / CBS News

[This story previously aired on July 4, 2020.]

In 2018, "48 Hours" first reported that the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department had talked for the first time about their investigation into the drowning death of iconic actress Natalie Wood 36 years ago, calling her husband, actor Robert Wagner, a person of interest .

"As we've investigated the case over the last six years , I think he's more of a person of interest now," Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department Lieutenant John Corina says of Wagner in an interview with "48 Hours" correspondent Erin Moriarty. "I mean, we know now that he was the last person to be with Natalie before she disappeared."

Wood drowned off the coast of Catalina Island in California in November 1981 after she went missing from the Splendour, her family's yacht. Also aboard that night were Wagner, Captain Dennis Davern, and Wood's friend and fellow actor, Christopher Walken.

Her death was originally ruled an accident, but investigators reopened the case just over six years ago.

Rumors of foul play have long surrounded Wood's mysterious death.  At first, the three men aboard the boat -- Wagner, Walken and Davern -- told detectives that they assumed Wood, famously terrified of dark water, took off in a dinghy and went ashore. Over time, however, Wagner and Davern's accounts have shifted, a red flag to the investigators.

Investigators say Wagner has refused to speak with them since the case was reopened. Corina tells Moriarty he doesn't believe Wagner has told the whole story.

"I haven't seen him tell the details that match ... all the other witnesses in this case," Corina says of Wagner. "I think he's constantly ... he's changed the -- his story a little bit. ...and his version of events just don't add up." 

Walken has spoken with investigators.

Was it an accident or something more?

"We have not been able to prove this was a homicide. And we haven't been able to prove that this was an accident, either," says Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department Detective Ralph Hernandez. "The ultimate problem is we don't know how she ended up in the water."

THE INVESTIGATION

Natalie Wood was, in life, one of Hollywood's most alluring actresses. In death, she still reigns, but now as one of its most enduring mysteries.

Charles Osgood |CBS News report :  Actress Natalie Wood is dead at 43 the apparent victim of a drowning accident of Santa Catalina Island in California.

In 1981, Wood's death was quickly dismissed as an accidental drowning. But rumors and allegations of foul play, fueled in great part by the boat's captain, Dennis Davern, have never gone away.

Dennis Davern : I just didn't want my whole life to go by without having the truth come out.

So in 2011 – 30 years after Wood's death – Davern and more than 700 others signed a petition addressed to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department outlining what they considered flaws in the original investigation.

Lt. John Corina [to reporters in 2011]: It was already determined to be an accidental drowning, but the information we received made us want to take another look at the case.

About nine months after the investigation was reopened, there was another stunning announcement. The Medical Examiner's Office changed the manner of death from accident to undetermined, triggering an avalanche of news coverage and unleashing a flood of new leads.

Lt. John Corina : …because of the press conferences we had …  we found a lot more clues, a lot more evidence, a lot more witnesses .

For more than six years, veteran Homicide Detective Ralph Hernandez and Lieutenant. John Corina have doggedly pursued this case. 

Lt. John Corina : Six years later, we've-- followed up on all the clues, over 100, 150 clues we've followed up on. …Talked to a lotta people.

These detectives even travelled to Hawaii twice to comb the Wagner's yacht for clues. It was docked there by its new owner.

•  2012: L.A. County homicide detectives investigate Natalie Wood family boat in Hawaii

"48 Hours" showed up in Hawaii, but the detectives wouldn't talk then and refused to speak for six years. Then, for the first time, spoke publically about evidence they uncovered and there was a lot to tell.

Erin Moriarty : Does that evidence lead you to believe … that whatever happened to Natalie Wood was not an accident?

Lt. John Corina: It does. It actually … confirms my suspicions even more that -- what was originally reported isn't exactly what happened.

They point to the numerous bruises on Wood's body that were photographed and noted in the autopsy report. It's some of those bruises and where they were located that played a big part in convincing a medical examiner to change the manner of death.

Erin Moriarty : Why are all these bruises suspicious to you?

Det. Ralph Hernandez : Because she looked like the victim of an assault.

• Feb 1, 2018: Natalie Wood's drowning death probed as 'suspicious death" sheriff official says

Another red flag: the story the three men on the boat -- Captain Dennis Davern, actor Christopher Walken and Robert Wagner -- told the original investigators.

LT. John Corina : It didn't fit the smell test, you know? …it didn't make sense.  

All three men told police that they assumed Wood had left the Splendour on the yacht's dinghy, despite the late hour and stormy weather.

Lt. John Corina : That didn't even make any sense to me. …Why would Natalie Wood, this big movie star … try to go out on a dinghy in the middle of the night in her socks, in her pajamas  at midnight, in rough seas.

That story also makes no sense to Natalie's younger sister, actress and former Bond girl, Lana Wood.

Erin Moriarty : Is there any possibility … that she would get in that boat, and leave?

Lana Wood : No, no not with a gun to her head.

Natalie Wood reportedly had never operated the dinghy on her own and there was her well-documented lifelong fear of "dark water."

Natalie Wood : [From "Biography"]:  I've always been terrified, still am, of water, dark water, sea water.

Lana Wood : When I think of her in that water, in the dark, in the cold … and the one thing that she feared was water and that's where she finishes her life?

Sam Kashner | Vanity Fair contributing editor: I know it's a cliché, but she really was America's sweetheart.

Sam Kashner: America had grown up with her. She was the little doubting girl in "Miracle on 34th Street" and then, she was running with that sort of … troubled pack in "Rebel Without a Cause." And then, of course, that incredible performance in "Splendor in the Grass" … She was in "West Side Story" … and "Gypsy" … and some of these great iconic films of the early '60s. 

By the time she was 18, Wood had her first of three Academy Award nominations.

In 2008, Robert Wagner, also known as R.J., talked about Natalie on "CBS Sunday Morning."

Robert Wagner ["CBS Sunday Morning"]: She was so gifted. … She was a very, very fine actress. And people loved her. …You know they adored her.

He recalled their first date when Natalie was just 18 and R.J. was 26:

Robert Wagner ["CBS Sunday Morning"]: I started taking her out after that.  And it led -- one thing led to another, and a year later we were married.

Erin Moriarty : Was Natalie in love with R.J. when they first got married?

Lana Wood : She was madly in love with him. He was the perfect golden boy.

But the pressures of living under Hollywood's relentless scrutiny weighed heavily on the marriage, says close family friend Mart Crowley.

Mart Crowley : They were hounded by the press. They were presented as the ideal couple. Far beyond what any normal human being could live up to.

And now, these investigators say they've tracked down stunning new evidence that Wood and Wagner may have been more human than anyone knew -- allegations that Natalie fled the couple's house one night, in fear for her life.

A new witness -- a former neighbor who says he was 12 years old at the time – remembers late one night, he was awakened by somebody banging on the door. It was Natalie Wood.

Lt. John Corina : …she was so afraid of him … she ran to a neighbor's house yelling … he's gonna kill me. And looking for help and looking for safety. And so a neighbor took her in.

According to the witness, Wood stayed the night and returned home the next morning. But so far, that's the only episode of alleged violence investigators have found.

After just four years, the couple's first marriage came to a bitter end, and Wood began dating Hollywood heartthrob Warren Beatty.

Robert Wagner ["CBS Sunday Morning"]: His career was on fire.  And -- our relationship was gone. And why not?  He was in love with her.  

Wagner admitted that Wood's stardom and his own insecurities probably tore them apart.

Robert Wagner ["CBS Sunday Morning"]: It was basically my inadequacy that didn't -- that didn't make it work. …It made me feel very sad, and very broken hearted.  And -- I felt, you know, I had failed in the relationship. …And I never thought that I'd ever get it back again. 

Mart Crowley : Both of them were besotted with each other. …After they got divorced ,they went on to other partners and had children, but those marriages didn't work out and eventually they found each other again and got back together and got married a second time.

Erin Moriarty : How did you find out she was going back with R.J.?

Lana Wood: A dinner party … family only. R.J. was there in the living room. … And … she announced that, you know, "R.J. and I are going to be remarried."… "Wow." And all she did was she looked down, and she said, "Sometimes, it's better to be with the devil you know than the devil you don't."

Wagner sees it differently.

Robert Wagner ["CBS Sunday Morning"]: We felt that we had found something that was so precious to us, and it was, that-- we did everything in the world we could to protect it.

They remarried, had a daughter named Courtney and were together for nine years … until that final fatal voyage to Catalina Island.

TENSION ABOARD THE SPLENDOUR

On a miserable cold and rainy Friday in November 1981, the Splendour departed Marina del Rey with Natalie Wood, Robert Wagner, Captain Dennis Davern and one of Hollywood's hottest young actors, Christopher Walken.

Sam Kashner :  As soon as Chris Walken walked up the gangplank to the Splendour in his peacoat with the collar turned up, Robert Wagner took an instant dislike to him… Chris was fresh off winning the Academy Award for "The Deer Hunter."

Walken was now shooting a film with Wood and there were rumors of an affair.

Dennis Davern : You could see a little bit of jealousy from Robert Wagner … It just kept getting more tense … every minute of the day.

Lt. John Corina : He felt that … Natalie was paying way more attention to Christopher Walken than she was paying attention to him.

When the Splendour docked at Catalina Island, Wood, Wagner and Walken went ashore to the town of Avalon and began drinking heavily. "48 Hours" spoke to Dennis Davern in 2011.

Dennis Davern : The jealousy was under the surface until there was so much drinking that it started to come out and it was obvious.

Once back on the Splendour, Davern says the tension escalated.  And now, for the first time, investigators say they have a new witness corroborating Davern's account. That Friday, someone on a nearby boat claims to have been close enough to see and hear a fight between the couple.

Det. Ralph Hernandez : Natalie, to this witness, appeared to be the aggressor in the argument, appeared to be intoxicated. Robert Wagner appeared to try and walk away from -- from the argument.  At the point that he's walking away, she actually fell down to one knee.

Davern says the couple was fighting over whether to move the Splendour to the other side of Catalina Island.

Lt. John Corina : He wanted to move the boat at night. …But she didn't want him drivin' the boat at night. It's kinda dangerous to do that, especially when it's so rough out there and rainy.

Dennis Davern : Natalie said she wasn't gonna stand for this and would I take her to shore. 

Wood had Davern take her on the dinghy to Avalon, where she desperately tried to get off the island.

Mart Crowley : She did indeed call me on Friday night. She said, "Can you come and get me?" (laughs) And I said, "What?"

Lt. John Corina : She couldn't get a boat or a flight outta there because of the weather and the time of night so she had to spend the night there.

Unwilling to return to the Splendour that night, Wood got two hotel rooms -- one for her, one for Davern --  and then reportedly spent the night crying on Davern's shoulder.

Sam Kashner : She poured her heart out to him about how she was feeling … And according to Dennis, about some of the difficulties in … their marriage … that it was becoming increasingly harder for her to deal with his professional jealousy. 

Erin Moriarty : And what did Dennis tell you about that night?

Lana Wood : That she was furious …that she was talking about leaving him.

Erin Moriarty : Leaving him, not just leaving for the weekend?

Lana Wood : No, leaving him, divorcing, leaving.

Lt. John Corina : He felt that if she had le -- gone back to the mainland that night, she was so angry, she woulda divorced Wagner … the next day.

The next morning, Saturday, Wood had a change of heart. 

Dennis Davern : She decided, "Well hey, let's-- let's go back to the boat and let's -- let's see if we can smooth everything over here and I'll make a nice breakfast."

Davern says things did get better, at first. Natalie even agreed to let Wagner move the yacht to the other, far more desolate side of the island.

But by that evening things were once again tense, says Davern, when he and Wagner joined Walken and Wood – who had already gone ashore and were drinking at the bar.     

Dennis Davern : When R.J. and I walked into the restaurant, and he saw Natalie and Christopher sitting at the bar laughing and having a wonderful time, he started to really, really heat up. 

Lt. John Corina : According to other people who were there-- at the—bar—at the restaurant … they described him as irritated, he was tense. And according to Davern, Natalie and Walken were kind of ignoring him. They didn't really acknowledge him the whole time and they were just kinda havin' a good time by themselves, partying and drinking.

Witnesses say all four were so drunk that when they left, the restaurant manager alerted the harbormaster.    

Lt. John Corina : He calls the harbormaster and says, "Hey, you know, Robert Wagner, Natalie Wood are comin' your way. They're really intoxicated. Make sure they get … back to their boat OK."

They got back safely, but things were about to turn ugly.

Lana Wood : Everything that I've heard from Dennis … Natalie's temper was surfacing. R.J.'s certainly was. …It got out of hand in the worst way possible.

FINAL HOURS

For more than 38 years, the sea has kept her secrets about the night Natalie Wood died -- secrets these investigators believe can be uncovered.  But with all the shifting stories, witnesses with failing memories or long dead, Detective Hernandez knows time is running out.

Erin Moriarty : Why does a case that is now really more than 36 years old matter?

Det. Ralph Hernandez : Because somebody died. And no matter what, ultimately, that's our job -- to find the truth.

Hernandez and his partner, Kevin Lowe, now retired, brought their key witness, Dennis Davern, all the way to Hawaii where the boat was docked. And there Davern reenacted his version of events. They spent a full day photographing, measuring and researching.

Det. Ralph Hernandez : We wanted to take Dennis Davern there just to see what-- you know, kinda jog his memory and see what details and, again, get his perspective.

Davern is a crucial but problematic witness. After initially telling police one thing, he changed his story, sold it to tabloid magazines and collaborated on a tell-all book. But Davern claims he was motivated by his conscience, not greed.

Dennis Davern : I really don't just want money. What I really want is to give Natalie a voice.

Erin Moriarty : You find him credible?

Lt. John Corina : I find his story and -- his version of events when he talked to us -- everything fit. …Makes more sense of what happened and is corroborated by other people.

SATURDAY, NOV. 28, 1981 | AROUND 10:30 P.M.

Davern told investigators that problems between Robert Wagner and his wife, building for two days, exploded when they returned to the Splendour after dinner. Wood, by then in her flannel nightgown and warm socks, joined Walken, Davern and Wagner in the salon – the living area of the boat.

Dennis Davern : Natalie puts on the kettle to have a cup of tea. I light a couple candles. I opened a bottle of wine. Natalie and Christopher continued to giggle … just having fun.  And then Robert Wagner, out of the clear blue, picked up the bottle of wine and smashed it.

Lt. John Corina : It breaks and goes everywhere. And he yells at Walken, "What are you tryin' to do, f--- my wife?" and … everything just kinda stops.

Dennis Davern : Natalie, she said, "I cannot take this" and she went into her room.  

According to Davern, Walken also went to his room.

Dennis Davern : Then R.J. went into … Natalie and R.J.'s room … started arguing, yelling … things being thrown about.

At that point, Davern also leaves and goes up to the bridge at the top of the boat, says Corina.

Lt. John Corina : He hears them arguing. The arguing's gettin' louder. …And he hears a lot of -- thumping. …He says it sounds to him like there's … a physical fight goin' on inside there, to the point where he's so concerned, he – he -- walks back down and he knocks on the door.

Lt. John Corina : And -- Robert Wagner opens the door and he says he has this look -- crazed look on his face and he says, "Is everything OK, boss?" And he's, like, "Go away." …he looked so angry, he says, "I was worried about my own safety, that I just -- I left. I went back up to the bridge."

Davern told investigators that his line of sight was blocked by the boat's rain shield, but he heard everything.

Dennis Davern : The fighting continued.  And then … to the back of the boat. I was concerned that something really bad was going down, because … the fighting, the arguing was so intense.

Until 2017, Davern was the only person to put both Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood outside on the back of the boat arguing Saturday night before she died.

Lt. John Corina [to reporters in 2011]: We have received information, which we thought was substantial…

But after the press conference reopening the case, investigators got a huge break. Two new witnesses told detectives they not only heard the fight, one of them says she saw it.

Det. Ralph Hernandez : Saw figures on the back of the Splendour, a male and a female, whose voices they recognized as being Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood arguing in the back of the boat.

Erin Moriarty :  And how credible are these new witnesses?

Lt. John Corina : They're very credible. They have no reason to lie. And … their story matches what Dennis Davern says.

Like Davern, both witnesses say the argument stopped suddenly.

Dennis Davern : And then all of a sudden there was nothing -- complete silence.

Nothing but the sounds of a rough sea on a cold, dark November night, says Corina.

Lt. John Corina : No one saw anybody go in the water. Nobody heard a splash … Nobody heard anything.  They just heard the argument and then silence.

There was one woman, in the months following Wood's death, who said publically that she heard a woman calling for help. But Corina now thinks she was mistaken. And Davern says 10 minutes after the fight ended, he finally went back downstairs.

Lt. John Corina : Robert Wagner's now in the stateroom. And he sees Robert Wagner is crying. And he says, "Natalie's gone. She's missing."

Corina says Robert Wagner then tells Davern to go search the boat for her.

Lt. John Corina : He can't find her anywhere. …He comes back out and tells him, "I can't find her." Robert Wagner tells her (sic), "Oh, the dinghy's now missing as well."

Corina and Hernandez think it's possible that someone could have untied the dinghy while Davern searched the boat.

Dennis Davern :  I didn't untie it. Christopher didn't untie it. I don't think Natalie would have untied it.

Davern says Wagner refused to call for help.

Lt. John Corina : And Robert Wagner tells him … "Maybe she just went into town I think to -- go to a bar or something."

Dennis Davern : I said to Robert Wagner, "Maybe I should turn on the searchlight."  He said, "Don't do that."

Lt. John Corina : He says, "Well, maybe we should get on the radio and call somebody." Robert Wagner says, "No, we don't wanna call anybody. Let's just wait and see if she comes back."

According to the story Davern told investigators, Wagner then breaks out a bottle of scotch, and the two men sit drinking while more than an hour passes.

Dennis Davern : Before you know it, we're oblivious … And, it's time. We have to call somebody. She's gone.

Erin Moriarty : By Robert Wagner's own statement, he knew she was missing by around midnight, but no call—no call for help is made till 1:30?

Lt. John Corina : Right. And when he did make that call for help, it wasn't for, "Hey -- need to search the water for her." He asked people … in town to search for her in town. …When they finally convinced Robert Wagner, "Hey, you need to call the Coast Guard." And -- kinda he  -- almost reluctantly, he said, "OK, yeah, w -- I guess we better call 'em."

Erin Moriarty : And what do you make of that?

Lt. John Corina : Well, if your wife is missing and the dinghy's missing, I'm gonna go look for her. I wanna find her right away. I'm gonna be worried about her, especially in seas like that … it's dark out. She doesn't like the water.  She doesn't like to swim … There's no reason for her to get in that dinghy to go anywhere.

Lt. John Corina : If she wanted to go somewhere, she would ask Dennis Davern to take her somewhere, like she did the night before when she wanted to go into town.  … He did. That's his job.

Lt. John Corina: It didn't make any sense, the story Robert Wagner was telling. And it still doesn't make any sense to me, that -- to say that she would get in the dinghy by herself and just -- and take off.

Dennis Davern : She didn't even know how to start it.

Lana Wood : She wouldn't do it. In a nightgown? …She didn't get the mail in a nightgown.

After the Coast Guard was finally called about 3:30 a.m., over three hours after Natalie Wood was reportedly last seen alive, the search went into high gear. Wagner's friend, Islander Doug Bombard, jumped in his boat and joined in the hunt. At 7:44 a.m., he says he saw something red bobbing on top of the water.

Doug Bombard : It was about this far from shore where I found the body … The body was just basically hanging in that jacket. That jacket was buoying her up … she had a cotton nightgown on, and her hair was floating as you can imagine.

When authorities arrived, Bombard headed to the Splendour to break the news to his friend -- a moment Robert Wagner later recalled in the audio recording of his 2008 memoir, "Pieces of My Heart:."

Robert Wagner [audio book]: Doug pulled up and got out of his boat.  "Where is she?" I asked him.  Doug looked at me.  "She's dead, R.J..."  My knees went out; everything went away from me."

Dennis Davern : I remember people coming on the boat saying that they had found Natalie Wood floating, that she had drowned. …I just couldn't believe it.

SHIFTING STORIES

News of Natalie Wood's sudden death at the age of 43 quickly spread across the globe. Family friend Mart Crowley will never forget getting the call.

Mart Crowley : When I picked up the phone it was R.J. and he just screamed into the phone. "She's gone."

Lana Wood : I just couldn't believe it. I just couldn't … Things like that don't happen. And they don't happen to my sister, my family. And they don't happen to Natalie Wood … it's not real.

But it was all too real for Dennis Davern. Soon after the movie star was found floating face down in the waters off Blue Cavern Point, Robert Wagner and Christopher Walken left the island in a police helicopter , leaving Davern the grim task of identifying Natalie Wood's body.

 Dennis Davern : Robert Wagner asked me … if I would identify her body, 'cause he didn't want to. …It was the eeriest feeling I've ever had my life, to look at her laying there, lifeless. It was so disturbing.

Lt. John Corina [to Moriarty]: You would think he'd wanna stick around and identify his wife and make sure her body was taken care of … That would be maybe what I would do. … maybe he's different.

Corina understands that grief can do strange things to people. But that doesn't explain why, according to Davern, Wagner immediately came up with a story and told the men on the boat to stick to it.   

Dennis Davern : Wagner was very serious about having the stories being the same

Dennis Davern : It was kinda like, "Here we are, OK, Dennis, Christopher, me, this is what it is. You got it?  That's what it is. OK?  OK?" …"OK … if all the stories are the same there's really not much to investigate."

Davern says he now regrets going along with it, but Corina says he understands how it could have happened. 

Lt. John Corina : You gotta understand … Davern back then … people mischaracterize him as the captain of the boat. …He's not the captain of the boat. He's the caretaker of the boat. …Robert Wagner's the guy who pays him … that's his meal ticket. … if you look at … Robert Wagner's statement at the time, they almost parrot each other.

All three men told the original detective, Duane Rasure, that they thought Natalie had taken the dinghy ashore. The detective told "48 Hours" in 2011 that he believed them.

Det. Duane Rasure : I didn't doubt anything Robert Wagner told me. …Christopher Walken he basically told me the same story.  It was pretty well confirmed. …They assumed that she got in that Zodiac and went ashore.

There was no mention of a fight.

Det. Duane Rasure: I saw the shattered glass in disarray and I questioned Robert Wagner about that and says it … happened sometime during their travels … just due to rough seas.  I had no reason to question him any further. 

Detective Rasure, who has since died, only interviewed Wagner one more time. It was the day after Natalie's funeral at the actor's bedside with his attorney present.

Det. Duane Rasure: When I interviewed Robert Wagner, there was no indication of any jealousy, no problems. … there was no sign of foul play in my mind.

Coroner Thomas Noguchi agreed, saying, "It is a tragic accidental drowning."

Two weeks after the actress's death, the case was officially closed. But Davern says his nightmare was just beginning.

Dennis Davern : I felt like I was … a prisoner.

Davern says Wagner insisted he move into his guest house in Beverly Hills.

Dennis Davern : I was to stay indoors at all times, not communicate with anybody.

Eventually, Davern left California for the East Coast, but was never able to escape the past.

Dennis Davern : I think he was in a way hunted down by his own conscience … He really seemed like a hunted man.

In the early 1990s, Lana Wood says a tormented, seemingly inebriated Dennis Davern started calling her.

Erin Moriarty : What, specifically, did he tell you?

Lana Wood : He said, "It wasn't an accident." And he said, "It was ugly."

Lana Wood says she didn't want to believe it at first.

Lana Wood : I didn't wanna think that. But there are so many things that are just facts.

She has since become one of R.J. Wagner's harshest critics, going so far as to publically accuse him of foul play.

Erin Moriarty : Do you think she was pushed in the water?

Lana Wood : Yes.

Erin Moriarty : Do you believe it was her husband R.J. Wagner?

Lana Wood: Absolutely. Yes.

Like Davern, Lana Wood -- who has a long, bitter history with Wagner -- has been accused of exploiting Natalie's death for money and attention … something she denies.

Lana Wood : It's just time for the truth … It's time to stop the lies and the deception and the finger-pointing. It's just not right.

Erin Moriarty : Do you think Robert Wagner has ever told the truth of exactly what happened?

Lt. John Corina : I haven't seen it. I haven't seen him tell the details … that match … all the other witnesses in this case. I think he's constantly … changed … his story a little bit. And … his version of events just don't add up.

Robert Wagner has never conceded that he and Wood had a fight on the boat  that night.  But in his memoir, he did come clean about smashing that wine bottle -- the one he originally told the police broke in rough seas. Again, Wagner reading from his book:

Robert Wagner [audio book ]: Walken and I got into an argument. …At one point, I picked up a wine bottle, slammed it on the table and broke it into pieces. Natalie was already below decks at that point.

In Wagner's version of the story, he didn't smash that bottle in a jealous rage as Davern claims, but in an argument with Walken over Wood's career. In fact, he says she wasn't even in the room.

Robert Wagner [2008, "CBS Sunday Morning" ]: I looked below. I saw Natalie was doing something with her hair. She was gonna go to bed. And she shut the door.  And Chris and I were still talking.

Robert Wagner [2008, "CBS Sunday Morning"]: When I went down below, she wasn't there. The dinghy was gone … and I looked around for her, and I couldn't -- I didn't know where she was…

Originally, Wagner told the detective he thought Natalie had taken the dinghy and gone ashore. But that – like so many other details -- has changed to what is now called the   "the banging dinghy theory." 

Robert Wagner [audio book]: Natalie was in the master cabin and heard the dinghy banging against the side. She got up to retie it. She slipped on the swim step on the stern … and was either stunned or knocked unconscious and rolled in the water. The loose dinghy floated away. My theory fits the few facts we have.

Dennis Davern : That story is 100-percent false.

Dennis Davern : The dinghy really wasn't banging because … it was tied off with two lines, securely to the boat.

Lt. John Corina : The reality is … what does the evidence show? …she wouldn't go back and -- that's not her. That's not her job. … she would never go worry about the dinghy. She's gonna tell Dennis Davern, "Hey, can you go tie that dinghy down? It's making noise." That's his job.

Six years of investigation, four new key witnesses. Two determined investigators with a lot of questions for Robert Wagner.

Lt. John Corina : As we've investigated the case over the last six years, I think he's more of a person of interest now. I mean, we-- we know now that he was the last person-- to be with Natalie before she disappeared.

PERSON OF INTEREST

For the first time in the more than 36 years since Natalie Wood drowned off Catalina Island, investigators called her husband a person of interest -- but they stopped short of calling him a suspect.  

• Feb. 1, 2018: Investigator calls Robert Wagner a "person of Interest" in Natalie Wood's drowning death

Det. Ralph Hernandez : We have not been able to prove that this was a homicide. And we haven't been able to prove that this was an accident either.

Det. Ralph Hernandez: The ultimate problem is we don't know how she ended up in the water.

The statutes of limitations have run out on all crimes except one: murder. And to prove murder, there has to be evidence that someone intentionally put Natalie in the water; falling in by accident wouldn't count.

Det. Ralph Hernandez :  If … people knew that Natalie Wood was in the water and they didn't save her. They could've saved her. And they didn't save her. Would that be enough to bring charges in this case?

No. That's not. …believe it or not there is no duty to act.

Robert Wagner: [2008, "CBS Sunday Morning"]: Believe me, believe me, if she had called out or she had made any-- noises, or if we'd a heard anything, we were three of us there.  We would have done something.  Nobody heard anything.

But investigators remain troubled by the evidence they do have: the witnesses who talk about a fight on the back of the boat, and the number and locations of fresh bruises on Natalie's body.

Det. Ralph Hernandez : I think I've been a cop long enough to see … those appear to be assaultive in nature.

Could the bruises have instead come from a drunken fall? Perhaps. But investigators think the circumstantial evidence -- the fight, the alcohol, the jealousy -- may suggest another scenario

Det. John Corina : Someone can get so enraged, they can't control their anger. Like a crime of passion, it just happens. And they didn't mean for it to happen. …And then later on, they're sorry about it. But it's too late.

For his part, Christopher Walken has remained largely silent through the years. He was asked about the case during an Oct. 12, 2012, appearance on "CBS This Morning."   

Gayle King | "CBS This Morning" co-host : I have to ask you about Natalie Wood. They just reopened the case. What's your recollection from that night?

Chris Walken : I stopped talking about that 30 years ago, and there's so much information, books and internet … Anything you want to know, just go look.

He did, however, interview with the new investigation.

Lt. John Corina : I'm not gonna go into what Christopher Walken said. … what he told us was in confidence, at least for now.

Investigators did tell "48 Hours" that Walken is not a person of interest.

Despite several attempts to re-interview Robert Wagner, including a trip to Aspen where Wagner lives with his wife, actress Jill St. John, the investigators say the actor has refused to speak with them.   

Lt. John Corina : Robert Wagner, of course, we wanna talk to him and get his side of the story and try to clarify things. He's, you know, refused -- time and time again to talk to us.

One part of Robert Wagner's story has never changed. He continues to insist Natalie Wood's death was an accident. But there is a part of him that blames himself.

Robert Wagner [2008, "CBS Sunday Morning"]: When you're in love, you're responsible for the other one.  She's responsible for me and I was responsible for her. And, you know, this accident that occurred -- I wasn't there.  I wasn't there for her.  And that's always within me.

In February 2021, Robert Wagner turned 91. This past July, Natalie would have been 83  … a sad milestone for those who loved her.

Dennis Davern : It really does pain me, to this day, to know that she is gone when she really had a whole life in front of her.

Lana Wood : I was 35 when Natalie died, and I am now 71. …Before my life is over, I would like to put Natalie's to rest by knowing the truth.

By speaking out, Lt. Corina and Det. Hernandez are hoping new witnesses will come forward -- either someone who saw something, heard something or was told something.  Someone who will help answer the question once and for all: how did Natalie Wood end up in the water.

Like any cold case, they intend to work it until it's solved.  

Det. Ralph Hernandez :  We're not ever gonna close it until we get to the truth.

"48 Hours"' requests to interview Robert Wagner and Christopher Walken were declined by their representatives.

This fall, Lana Wood published "Little Sister: My Investigation into the Mysterious Death of Natalie Wood."  

HAVE INFORMATION?

Anyone with information is asked to call the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Homicide Bureau at 323-890-5500 .  

Produced by Liza Finley, Judy Rybak, Ryan Smith and Alec Sirken. Peter Schweitzer is the senior producer. Nancy Kramer is the executive story editor. Susan Zirinsky is the senior executive producer.  

• Christopher Walken

Erin Moriarty is a "48 Hours" correspondent and host of the true-crime podcast, "My Life of Crime."

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Natalie Wood's Death Boat Ready for Open Water Again

Owner of the splendour , the yacht the actress disappeared from in 1981, has finished renovations and is taking cruise reservations.

Robert Wagner ditched the boat where Natalie Wood spent her final hours years ago.

The Splendour has passed through several owners since and now, just as police are reexamining the strange case of the actress' death after 30 years, it is ready to set sail, E! News has exclusively learned.

First of all, where can people book a cruise on the infamous boat?

MORE: Natalie Wood's Mysterious Death: A Who's Who Guide

The Splendour , which Los Angeles Sheriff's homicide detectives say they'll be visiting as part of their investigation, has been docked in Honolulu for the past 25 years, since Ron Nelson bought it at a boat show in Long Beach, Calif.

Nelson's renovations on the pleasure cruiser have been "ongoing" since he brought it to Oahu in 1986 and now folks are calling him "non-stop" about it, he says—especially now that people are wondering once again whether or not the Splendour was the scene of a crime, rather than an accidental drowning.

It was eventually presumed that Wood slipped and fallen from the deck of the boat on the evening of Nov. 28, 1981, after consuming a few too many glasses of wine while docked off of Catalina Island with Wagner and her Brainstorm costar Christopher Walken —neither of whom are now suspects, according to investigators.

READ: Natalie Wood Case: What's the Yacht Captain's Motive?

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Dennis Davern , the former skipper of the boat and a longtime friend of Wood's, recently told detectives that he didn't tell the whole truth about what he witnessed that night 30 years ago, and then he said on Today that he felt Wagner was responsible for what happened to his then-wife.

And Nelson most certainly knows all about the lore—"I've read pretty much every article ever written about it," he says—and he tells E! News he never worried or felt superstitious about buying something with such an eerie history attached to it.

He says the boat will be ready to charter within the next two or three weeks and he's taking reservations at [email protected]. "As long as I own it, this is where it will be," he says.

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Natalie Wood’s drowning now considered a ‘suspicious death’

FILE - This Nov. 30, 1981 file photo shows the “Prince Valiant,” the inflatable dinghy used by Natalie Wood, moored at the harbor in Avalon, Calif., after it washed up on the rocks on Santa Catalina Island. Patrolmen discovered the actress’ body 200 yards off Blue Cavern Point on Catalina Island, 100 yards away from the boat after a seven hour search. Investigators are now calling her husband, Robert Wagner, a “person of interest” in the 1981 death of Wood. Mystery has swirled around Wood’s death. It was declared an accident but police reopened the case in 2011 to see whether Wagner or anyone else played a role (AP Photo/Paul J. Harrington, File)

FILE - In this April 23, 1972 file photo, actor Robert Wagner and his former wife, actress Natalie Wood, pose at the Dorchester Hotel in London, England. Investigators are now calling Wagner a “person of interest” in the 1981 death of his wife Natalie Wood. Mystery has swirled around Wood’s death. It was declared an accident but police reopened the case in 2011 to see whether Wagner or anyone else played a role (AP File Photo)

FILE - This Nov. 29, 1981 file photo, the 55-foot yacht “Splendour,” belonging to actor Robert Wagner and his wife, actress Natalie Wood, sits in the waters at Avalon, Calif., on Santa Catalina Island, near where rescuers found the body of Wood, an apparent drowning victim. Investigators are now calling Wagner a “person of interest” in the 1981 death of Wood. Mystery has swirled around Wood’s death. It was declared an accident but police reopened the case in 2011 to see whether Wagner or anyone else played a role (AP Photo/Paul J. Harrington, File)

FILE - A Dec. 1, 1981 file photo shows actress Natalie Wood. Investigators are now calling 87-year-old actor Robert Wagner a “person of interest” in the 1981 death of his wife Natalie Wood. Mystery has swirled around Wood’s death. It was declared an accident but police reopened the case in 2011 to see whether Wagner or anyone else played a role. (AP Photo/File)

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — New witnesses have emerged in the 1981 drowning of actress Natalie Wood, prompting investigators to deem it a “suspicious death” and name her former husband, 87-year-old actor Robert Wagner, a “person of interest,” Los Angeles sheriff’s officials said Thursday.

For nearly four decades, mystery and speculation have swirled around the death of the actress who was nominated for three Academy Awards and starred in “West Side Story” and “Rebel Without a Cause.”

She was on a yacht with Wagner, actor Christopher Walken and the boat captain on Thanksgiving weekend of 1981. After a night of drinking, her body was found floating in the waters off Southern California’s Catalina Island. She was 43.

Investigators initially ruled it an accident but reopened the case in 2011 to see whether Wagner or anyone else played a role after the boat’s captain said he heard the couple arguing the night of her disappearance. The coroner’s office amended Wood’s death certificate the next year to include “drowning and other undetermined factors.”

In a statement Thursday, sheriff’s spokeswoman Nicole Nishida said new witnesses interviewed since the case was reopened gave statements that “portray a new sequence of events on the boat that night.”

One of the witnesses described hearing yelling and crashing sounds coming from the couple’s stateroom, she said. Shortly after that, separate witnesses heard a man and woman arguing on the back of the boat and believe the voices were those of Wood and Wagner, Nishida said.

The statements differed from the original version of events provided by witnesses, including those who were on the boat, she said.

The sheriff’s department said Wagner is considered a person of interest.

“Do we have enough to make an arrest at this moment? No,” Nishida said.

The police statement was issued after CBS News aired an interview with Los Angeles County sheriff’s Lt. John Corina, who said he doesn’t believe Wagner has told the whole story about what happened.

Investigators have said Wagner has not been interviewed since the probe was reopened. They said in 2013 that they had tried at least 10 times to interview him but he refused.

Wagner has denied any involvement in his wife’s death and no charges have been filed. His publicist, Alan Nierob, declined to comment Thursday.

Conflicting versions of what happened on the yacht have contributed to the mystery of her death. Wood, Wagner and Walken had all been drinking heavily in the hours before the actress disappeared.

Wagner wrote in a 2008 memoir that he and Walken argued that night. He wrote that Walken went to bed and he stayed up for a while, but when he went to bed, he noticed that his wife and a dinghy that had been attached to the yacht were missing.

Follow Michael Balsamo on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/MikeBalsamo1 .

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Natalie wood’s yacht captain claims robert wagner held him “hostage”.

Natalie Wood's yacht captain, Dennis Davern — who was on board the boat the night the actress died — claimed in a new interview that her former husband Robert Wagner held him hostage to prevent him from telling the truth.

By Evan Real

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Nearly 37 years after Natalie Woods died, the late actress’ yacht captain Dennis Davern is sharing what he remembers about her mysterious death.

During a Wednesday morning appearance on Megyn Kelly Today , Davern doubled down on his previous claim that he believes Wood’s former husband Robert Wagner pushed Wood off the side of the boat.

“I was interviewed by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, a lengthy interview, and I gave them all the information that I could give them,” Davern said of his most recent conversations with authorities. In his original testimony, Davern didn’t name Wagner as a potential suspect.

Davern continued: “After I gave them all that information, they asked me if I’d be willing to take a polygraph from the L.A. Sheriff’s Department and I said, ‘Yes, I would.'”

He then told host Megyn Kelly that he passed the polygraph test with “flying colors.”

In the 2014 book, Goodbye Natalie, Goodbye Splendour , Davern and co-author Marti Rulli allege that Wagner pushed Wood off the yacht to her death. Rulli appeared on Kelly’s show alongside Davern, where the writer attempted to defend Davern for waiting years to tell police what he believes to be the truth. 

“The first year after [Davern] stayed with Wagner, he wanted Dennis under his wing. So it was very hard to talk with his family, his family, his friends,” Rulli said of Davern, who continued to work for Wagner for a full year after Wood’s 1981 death. “And when I finally did get involved, and that’s when [Davern] planned to move away from L.A., we started early. This has been decades of effort.”

Davern — who hosts a new podcast,  Fatal Voyage: The Mysterious Death of Natalie Wood ,  with Rulli — also alleged that Wagner held him “hostage,” suggesting that the actor did so in an effort to bar him from telling the truth about Wood’s tragic incident.

“When I was at Robert Wagner’s house, I was actually there for just about a year. Robert Wagner got me a job at the studio. He was doing the TV series called Hart to Hart . If I would have a morning call, or something like that, to go to the studio, his driver would pick me up and take me from the house to the studio,” he said. “At the end of my work day, the driver would bring me back to the house. When I would go to bed for the night, you’d close the door [to my room] and there was sort of like a magnetic lock to where you couldn’t open the door.”

Added Davern: “I couldn’t get myself out of my own room. I thought maybe the whole house has this security system. Whether it did or not, I don’t know, but to me it was a very locked-in feeling.”

Wagner, now 88, had no comment when contacted by Megyn Kelly Today .

Wood drowned off the coast of Catalina in November 1981 after she went missing from her family’s yacht, Splendour. Wood, Wagner, Christopher Walken and Davern were all on board the night before Wood was found floating in the water, wearing a red down jacket and flannel nightgown. She was 43. 

Davern and Rulli’s interview comes months after police named Wagner a person of interest in the investigation back in February. The death was originally ruled an accident, following a two-week investigation, but in 2011, the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department reopened the death investigation, and a year later the L.A. coroner’s office amended Wood’s death certificate to change the manner of death from accidental drowning to “drowning and other undetermined factors.”

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First pictures: Inside the yacht where actress Natalie Wood died... where 'fan' has kept her bedroom untouched for 30 years

By Daily Mail Reporter Updated: 13:15 EDT, 19 November 2011

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It has been 30 years since Natalie Wood died after a night on the Splendour - but little has changed aboard in the intervening years.

The stateroom contains many of the same tiles, the same blue bed remains in exactly the same spot and the initials WW are still etched into the captain's seat.

This is the first look inside the Splendour yacht, currently docked in the Hawaiian harbour of Oahu, where the Hollywood actress met her tragic end.

Memories: The boat has undergone some renovations, but many details have been preserved

Tribute: The stateroom with the blue bed, dubbed 'Natalie's Room' still has the same tiles it did when Robert Wagner owned the vessel

Exterior: The Splendour, where actress Natalie Wood died, is currently docked in the harbour of Oahu in Hawaii

Former United Airlines flight attendant Ron Nelson bought the boat from Robert Wagner in 1986.

He carried out small renovations, before taking two friends on a trip to Catalina Island, where the actress died. He said it was a 'last goodbye to Natalie'. 

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Afterwards, they made the two week trip to Hawaii where he has spent 10 years restoring the boat. He said he was now almost ready to begin chartering voyages.

He has tried to keep his makeover as close to the original as possible, and has kept the stateroom with the blue bed, dubbed 'Natalie's Room', and most of the tiles.

Home: The Splendour is currently docked in the Hawaiian harbour of Oahu

Purchased: United Airlines flight attendant Ron Nelson bought the boat in 1986

Reminder: New owner Ron Nelson with the initials WW etched onto the captain's seat

The initials WW are still etched onto the captain's seat, just as they were when Wagner and Natalie owned the boat.

Nelson said the 60ft boat's history was one of the reasons why he bought it, and told Hawaii's KITV.com said: 'I have read pretty much every article ever written about her death.'

And asked whether the yacht carried Wood's spirit, he said: 'I won't say yay or nay whether I believe or not.

'There's been a lot of strange things that have happened on the boat.'

Preserved: Many aspects of the Splendour remain the same

Out on deck: The investigation into Natalie Wood's death has now re-opened

The first look inside the boat comes as police re-open the investigation into Natalie Wood's mysterious death 30 years ago.

Robert Wagner is not being treated as a suspect.

Christopher Walken, who was on the boat the night the West Side Story actress died, has hired a lawyer in response to the new inquiry into the case, which was originally ruled an accidental drowning.

Wagner, 81, yesterday issued a statement welcoming the fresh push for evidence from authorities.

And Nelson revealed investigators had contacted him as they wanted to visit the yacht as part of their probe.

Orders: New owner Ron Nelson sitting in the captain's chair of the Splendour

Together: Natalie Wood and her husband Robert Wagner embrace on their yacht Splendour two weeks before the tragedy. The couple married twice. First in 1957 before divorcing six years later and then again in 1972

Friends: Ms Wood with her co-star Christopher Walken - who was on the boat the night she died - during filming of her last motion picture Brainstorm

Share or comment on this article: Natalie Wood death: Pictures from inside the yacht where actress was on night she died

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Owner selling tragic Natalie Wood yacht because 'West Side Story star haunts it'

Ron Nelson is selling the yacht where Natalie Wood spent her final moments after claiming the actress still haunts the decks

• 14:45, 2 Nov 2014

The owner of the yacht on which film star Natalie Wood was last seen alive is putting it up for sale claiming that it is haunted by the actress.

Ron Nelson bought The Splendour in 1986 five years after Wood was found mysteriously drowned on the California coast.

But Nelson said that he has experienced an number of "supernatural" incidents including "weird falls" and has now decided to get rid of the boat.

He said: "It’s just like my feet came out from under me and I fell."

Another time he felt a presence : "Something sat down on the bed and then left."

Wood, best known for her part in West Side Story, died off the coast of Catalina Island. She had been on the boat with her husband Robert Wagner but at some point in the night left.

Her body was found a mile away in the sea with a small dinghy beached nearby.

The circumstances surrounding her death on November 29, 1981, have never been established.

Nelson, a former United Airlines flight attendant, has even had the vessel blessed by two Hawaiian kahunas - a kind of shaman - in an attempt to placate the restless spirit.

He bought the boat from Hollywood actor Robert Wagner then took it on a trip to Catalina Island on what he called a 'last goodbye to Natalie'.

Afterwards, he sailed to Hawaii where he has spent 10 years restoring the boat. He is hoping a museum will buy The Splendour to preserve it.

Nelson had earlier told a TV station that "there's been a lot of strange things that have happened on the boat".

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Inspired by the 1920’s American pleasure yachts and designed specifically for people who appreciate design, privacy and the finer things in life, the 65ft Splendour Yacht Komodo not only explores the Komodo National Park but also Bali, Lombok and Sumbawa. The yacht has three flat-surfaced decks and can comfortably accommodate up to six guests, but with room for a couple of extra children if required.

There are three air-conditioned cabins to choose from, as well as the back lounge, which can be converted to an outdoor cabin for guests who would like to sleep under the stars. The Master Cabin is located at the bow of the boat and was designed with maximum comfort and privacy in mind, complete with reading lights, ventilation hatches, portholes and a private en-suite bathroom.

The two Cocoon Cabins, located on the Lower Deck, are cosy and functional and equipped with reading lights and portholes. Both have direct access to a shared bathroom and toilet.

Life On Board

Whether you’re looking for a quiet spot to unwind with a book or a social area to hang out with your family or friends while sipping a drink at the bar or having dinner at the dining table, you’ll find plenty of space aboard the Splendour. Start your day on the Upper Deck with some morning yoga, soak up the sun, dive into the sea for a refreshing dip, or enjoy a cocktail while watching the dazzling Indonesian sunsets.

Slip into the cool waters off the Swim Deck for a wonderful snorkeling experience. Relax in the generously-sized back lounge or watch a movie or view your own photos and videos on the huge pull down screen that converts the back lounge into your own private cinema. At night Splendour’s alfresco Upper Deck will become your star-gazing platform.

On board facilities on the Splendour Yacht Charter include an eight-seater tender with 40HP engine available for private transfers, water-sports, and local voyages, snorkeling gear, a double stand-up paddleboard, two wakeboards and two surfboards.

The volcanic islands of Komodo, Lombok, Sumbawa and Bali inspire adventure. A range of activities is available to satisfy all ages and customized voyages have been carefully crafted to discover the most spectacular scenery and wildlife around the Indonesian waters. Hike at sunrise to stunning viewpoints that will take your breath away. Explore the islands and meet the villagers. Take the paddleboard and go bird watching.

Gaze in awe as thousands of bats come alive at sunset and shadow the sky. Encounter Komodo dragons in their natural habitat. Surf the world-class breaks of Lombok and Sumbawa. Enjoy a private sunset picnic on a deserted beach. Meanwhile, the waters of Indonesia are teeming with life and snorkeling is a wonderfully accessible activity for everyone including children.

Discover vibrant reefs of soft and hard corals and come face to face with colorful fish, turtles, gentle reef sharks and giant manta rays. The very able crew will ensure that you and your family and friends are well-looked after, not only on board and on land, but also on and under the water. The crew will also arrange treasure hunts for Splendour’s young pirates.

The Splendour Yacht Charter is the perfect customized private adventure for families and smaller groups seeking to explore an incredible diversity of nature, wildlife and scenery.

Itineraries & Prices

All itineraries are subject to change due to seasonal weather conditions (and resultant variations in river and tributary water levels) affecting accessibility to locations. Thus navigation routes, times and excursions may need to be modified at the cruise captain’s or your guide's discretion.

4 Day - Komodo National Park

Embarkation

AM : Start your journey with a small island with captivating beauty, both in the land and below, such as Sebayur island.

A great place for a starter, Sebayur is blessed with undulating hills of brownish-yellow grass, providing a pleasing contrast with the surrounding ocean. Its charming view invites you to take a short track to the hilltop, to enjoy an unobstructed ocean view and sense idyllic remoteness.

If you are a licensed diver, don’t miss the chance to dive in Sebayur - diving is Sebayur’s main attraction, anyway! A number of world-renown diving sites lie just a few hundreds of meters off the shore, such as the famous Batu Bolong, Crystal Rock, and Castle Rock. The surrounding marine life is spectacular with sloping reefs, coral walls, colorful sea critters, and schools of many kinds of fishes. It’s almost like diving in a clear aquarium. Past the beautiful coral plateau, the water is heaven for pelagic hunters, turtle galore, micro diving, and occasional passing Mantas.

PM : If you wish, you can spend your first afternoon here. The island is famous as one of the best spots in Flores to enjoy the most beautiful sunset ever. Sits on the idyllic hills and watch the sky change into pastel colors, before heading back to the cruise and prepare for tomorrow’s adventure.

Gili Lawa Darat

AM : Start the day with something fresh, and docking to Gili Lawa Darat is our suggestion. n fact, the island is one of the greatest places to catch a wonderful sunrise. Take a little tracking to the hills and enjoy an almost magical scenery when the sunrise from the horizon, slowly reveals the ocean and the bumpy hills of the archipelago from the darkness of the night. From January to May, you will be greeted with lush green grass covering the rolling hills, and the grass turns crisp and yellow during the dry season—turning the island into beautiful savannah.

PM : An afternoon in the cruise clearly calls for a dip in the clear water, and it will be a great loss to miss a chance to meet the Manta. The Manta Point in Komodo National Park waters is the best place to see these intelligent creatures, as the water is rich with plankton - a delight for the Manta Rays. The Mantas are often traveling in a group and are present almost all year round. Lucky divers can even spend solid 30 minutes of interaction with the Mantas as long as the condition is right.

Komodo National Park

AM : The fourth day of adventure will be perfect to visit the limelight of Komodo National Park, and that means the Komodo Dragons themselves! Sail to Rinca, home of the biggest lizard on earth.

PM : A visit to this daunting creature can only be compared by a thrilling stop to a massive bat cave, the Kelor island. They are sleeping soundly during the day and you can watch them safely from the boat, but the real deal happens at dusk. Thousands of bats fly when the sky is turning into velvety tangerine, scattered and start preying their food in the neighboring islands. This is your last night on the cruise, and surely this will be a view you could never forget.

Disembarkation

AM : The last day of the excursion is perfect for a sleepy pleasure before heading back to the port town. After so many adventures, having a last authentic vibe of Flores will be a foolproof closure, indeed. One last trek to the hills and you are set to grab the wonderful panoramic view of Flores, Rinca, and other islands you have visited.

PM : Relax in the white sand beaches before ending your Flores Komodo tours for good.

6 Day - Komodo

Padar Island

AM : After spending first two days with water activities, your third day of excursion should be something fun. Why not visit the famous Padar Island today? A trek to this island is one of the most essential things to do during a Flores tour package, something you don't want to miss. As the hills lack of shady trees, it’s best to take a sunrise track early in the morning while the air is still cooler.

Reach the hilltop where you can catch a spectacular sunrise, and you will understand why radar Island steals thousand hearts of wanderers. Once you have finished exploring the magnificent surrounding, make your way down to Padar’s remarkable multicolor beaches, particularly the pink one. It’s time to chill.

PM : Since you are visiting the pink beach of Padar, let’s just spent the whole day indulging in the blushing beaches? Lucky you, we can take you to another pink beach in the tip of Komodo National Park, hidden from other groups of travelers. Get into your snorkeling gear and you will see that the pink beach trails down beautifully to the sea bottom, blushing with the same hue.

Sunbathing in the pink sand while watching the contrasting blue ocean truly feels like a world away from everything. Sadly, it will come the time to leave this lovely beach, and it’s time for the next journey.

Accommodations

Social areas.

Suites & Cabins

Master cabin.

This room has been designed with maximum privacy and comfort in mind. The fine lines accompanying the bed will ensure you rest comfortably at night. The air-conditioned room features reading lights, ventilation hatches, and a personal B&O speaker system.

Double Cabin

The double rooms come with a touch of coziness and functionality. Guests can revive themselves with a good night's sleep in these cabins that come with the finest bedding for comfort. The cabins have direct access to a shared bathroom that comes with basic amenities.

Technical Information

• Air conditioning
• Snorkeling gear
• Stand up paddleboard
• Wakeboard / Water Ski
• Surf boards

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• All charter prices displayed are for private use of the entire vessel
• High season supplements apply (Christmas, New Year, Chinese New Year, Easter & Summer)
• Additional price for child after 6 pax adults : USD 40 per child