Did Roger Wagner Get Life Insurance Money For Natalie Wood's Death
Natalie Wood'south 1981 drowning expiry has remained i of Hollywood'south great mysteries for four decades.
But her sister Lana Forest believes there is i person to blame for the "Due west Side Story" actress' death: Natalie's husband, Robert Wagner.
"I don't believe information technology was premeditated," Lana, 75, told The Post. "Just that doesn't mean I don't think he did information technology: Of course he did!"
At present, she has written "Little Sister: My Investigation into the Mysterious Decease of Natalie Wood" (Dey Street Books), out Tuesday. The book — role memoir, office true-crime investigation using new evidence dug upward by homicide detectives — aims to dispel the myths and illuminate the facts surrounding Natalie's tragic expiry.
In it, Lana also alleges that histrion Kirk Douglas sexually assaulted a teenage Natalie — confirming i of Hollywood's oldest rumors.
Co-ordinate to the book, their mother, Maria, had dropped sixteen-year-old Natalie at the Chateau Marmont to come across Douglas, a very important histrion at the fourth dimension.
Lana was asleep in the motorcar when Natalie finally came back, disheveled and upset, whispering angrily at their mother. But Natalie later told her what had happened: Maria had bundled a meeting with Kirk Douglas, who sexually assaulted Natalie.
"I knocked on the door Mom told me to get to, and next matter I knew, Kirk Douglas was ushering me into his suite," Natalie told her, Lana writes in the book.
And then Natalie began to cry before murmuring softly, "He hurt me, Lana … It was like an out-of-body experience. I was terrified. I was confused."
"That actually affected her unabridged life — how she looked at things and how she perceived things," Lana recalled. Simply Natalie did zero about it, "considering of my mom telling her that she'd ruin her career, she'd never work once again."
Subsequently that, "Natalie was so guarded … And she actually mistrusted men afterward that."
Which makes Lana's allegations about Natalie's death all the more heartbreaking.
Lana woke upwards in her Los Angeles home the morning of Nov. 29, 1981, to a ringing phone — followed by a claret-curdling scream.
The 35-year-one-time leaped out of bed, establish her wailing mother on the floor and took the telephone away from her.
"I'k then sorry, Lana. I just heard virtually Natalie," said her friend on the line.
Natalie was, at that moment, supposed to be on a yacht with Wagner and her friend and current co-star Christopher Walken.
"They found her body this morning," the friend explained. "Washed up on shore on Catalina [Island]."
At outset, Lana didn't believe it. And then she turned on the Goggle box. According to breaking news, Natalie had disappeared from the yacht during the nighttime, supposedly taking a dinghy to — her husband would later say — "party hop." Her trunk was found floating in the water the side by side morning, in a nightgown, socks and a down jacket.
Co-ordinate to "Natalie Woods: What Remains Behind," a 2020 documentary fabricated by Wood's daughter, Natasha Gregson Wagner, the manager of a mainland restaurant where Natalie, Wagner, Walken and the yacht'south skipper, Dennis Davern, had dined the night before was worried they were all as well intoxicated to make it dorsum to the yacht. (Woods's toxicology written report revealed a blood-booze content of 0.fourteen percent, nearly twice virtually states' DWI limit.) But they did make it back, afterward 10:30 p.m. In the documentary, Wagner says he and Walken got into an argument, simply both thought Natalie was safe on the boat.
They went looking for her just after xi p.thou. and apparently discovered the dinghy missing.
"None of the things that [Wagner, Walken or the yacht'south skipper] said or that the constabulary said at that time rang true to me," Wood told The Postal service from her home in Los Angeles.
"The things that they were maxim that Natalie did" — that the nightgown-wearing actress had taken the yacht'southward dinghy to "party hop" amidst the boats parked in the harbor — "they might equally well have been saying that she was trying to fly to another planet. They were totally out of character."
A representative for Wagner had no annotate.
Over the next few months, she tried to get more than answers from Wagner — but he swiftly cut Lana out of his life, telling her to simply contact him through his lawyer. She tried non to read as well much into his strange beliefs.
But x years after Natalie'due south death, she received a telephone call out of the blueish from Dennis Davern, the yacht's skipper.
"I didn't tell the cops everything," he said between tears. "Non even close."
In 2011, the Los Angeles County Sheriff'southward Section reopened the example later on Davern'southward 2009 book, "Good day Natalie, Cheerio Splendour," revealed hehad heard the married couple arguing before Natalie's disappearance. That year, the coroner changed the cause of death to "drowning and other undetermined factors" after re-evaluating the case details, including that Natalie's body appeared to have fresh bruises when information technology was initially institute. Police reclassified the case equally "suspicious" and, in 2018, named Wagner, now 91, a "person of interest." The case remains open.
"It isn't for my sake, it'due south for Natalie's," Lana said of the book. "I felt like nobody was watching over Natalie. Nobody was trying to, you know, stand up up for her … She would have done the same for me."
Natalie Wood was built-in in 1938 in San Francisco, the oldest kid of Russian immigrants. A fortune teller told her mother, Maria, that she would give birth to a famous actress, and Maria did her all-time to manifest that prediction. Past the time Lana was born, in 1946, 8-twelvemonth-erstwhile Natalie was already a picture show star, acting aslope Orson Welles in "Tomorrow Is Forever" and filming "Phenomenon on 34th Street."
"I basically grew up on her sets," Lana said, calculation that her mother would drag baby Lana to lookout Natalie piece of work. Lana nabbed her showtime film function when she was seven, playing a younger version of her sister'southward character in the Western "The Searchers."
Lana never felt shy around Natalie's Hollywood friends similar Dennis Hopper and Tab Hunter, who would often come over and swim, or her boyfriends similar hotel heir Nicky Hilton. One mean solar day, Natalie's quiet "Rebel Without a Cause" co-star James Dean came by, and Lana ambushed him.
"I turned off all the lights and shone a flashlight on the wall and moved information technology quickly upward and downwards so it looked like it was dancing — I idea it looked like a stylish movie, and I wanted to show him," she said. "Poor Jimmy Dean sabbatum through it and then told [me] it was wonderful."
But Robert — "R.J." — Wagner was different. The 26-yr-old actor, who had starred in "Prince Valiant" and "A Buss Earlier Dying," began dating Natalie when the actress was 18, and he never even uttered a "hello" to 10-year-old Lana.
"I remember him walking down the hall by my room and that he had very blue eyes," she said. "Other than that, I felt absolutely nothing towards him."
In 1957, "When they got married the first time, I cried loudly throughout the entire ceremony," Lana said. Afterward, Natalie went over and put her arm around Lana, request her what was wrong. "I said, 'I but lost y'all.' And y'all know what? I was right. I did."
Lana continued to see Natalie — even living with her and R.J. at one bespeak when tensions with her female parent reached a boiling point — yet she noticed that her sister's new husband by and large stayed out of her fashion. Still, she was shocked in 1962 when Natalie showed up at their parents' house, distraught and with a haemorrhage hand.
Natalie told her family she had walked in on Wagner "in a compromising position" with his butler and was then "enraged that she squeezed the glass she was holding until it shattered and cutting her," Lana writes.
The couple divorced, with the press blaming the breakdown on Natalie's thing with her "Splendor in the Grass" co-star Warren Beatty. Lana said her sister didn't brainstorm dating Beatty until afterwards she and Wagner had split.
Natalie went on to marry producer Richard Gregson and give nascency to their daughter, Natasha; Wagner wednesday actress Marion Marshall, with whom he had daughter Katie. But x years later, both newly single, Natalie and Wagner announced they were getting married to each other a second time.
When Lana expressed confusion about their reunion, given that Wagner had cheated on her sister with a human being, their mother glibly parroted, "He's cured" of homosexual tendencies.
Pushed by Lana on the affair, Natalie told her: "Sometimes the devil yous know is improve than the devil you don't know."
"I would have really liked to hear, 'I dear him dearly and I can't alive without him,' something like that," Lana said. "Just to requite me a quote almost devils? It really didn't sit well."
Natalie and Wagner's daughter, Courtney, was built-in in 1974, and after making such hits as "Gypsy," "Westward Side Story" and "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice," Wood had largely disappeared from the big screen. In 1981, she was making the sci-fi movie "Begin" with Walken, and the two had become pals.
He was on the gunkhole the night she died, but has never spoken publicly nigh her death. (Lana told The Postal service that Walken has spoken with the detectives currently working on the case, nether the condition that his remarks would never be made public.)
Lana told The Post that she doesn't believe Natalie and Walken ever slept together, but that they were shut and had great chemical science. "Everybody flirts on sets."
After Natalie's decease, according to the book, Wagner began to care for Lana with outright hostility. He would invite her daughter and mother to dinner and exclude her. He ragged on Lana to the press afterwards she sold some of Natalie'southward clothes, and had his lawyer draw up a statement for Lana to sign, relinquishing any and all further claims against Natalie's manor.
Lana — a sometime extra who was Bond girl Plenty O'Toole in "Diamonds Are Forever" — had been employed backside the scenes in movie production, but afterwards her sister's death, she couldn't find whatever work. Eventually, Rowland Perkins, president of the Creative Artists Agency, called her and told her that Wagner had gotten her blacklisted in the industry.
"I have no thought [why he would blacklist me] other than it came back to me that he considers me a loose cannon," Lana told The Postal service.
She started selling dolls and got a job as a salesperson for Sprint. She and her immature daughter moved in with Maria, who was living in one of Natalie's old condos. Then Wagner kicked her out, explaining he was the rightful possessor.
"He was trying to make sure and sink me, but he wasn't able to," Lana said. "He didn't ruin me."
In the early 1990s, Dennis Davern began calling her, talking well-nigh Natalie and Wagner's troubled relationship. He told Lana — and would write in a 2011 testimonial — that he overheard Wagner charge Walken of wanting to "f–k" Natalie. He claimed that the married couple had a fight out on the boat's deck right before she went missing and that Wagner prevented him from putting out a call to shore for a missing person.
In 2009, Davern collaborated on a book well-nigh the incident, which exposed several inconsistencies in witness testimonials and holes in the investigation.
For 1, Wagner had told police that his married woman probably tried to take the dinghy out when she drowned, merely Davern said Natalie couldn't operate the dinghy. Plus, she couldn't swim and had a severe phobia of night water — due to that prophecy her mother had received from a fortune teller, who not merely told her she would take a famous daughter, merely as well that her daughter would drown.
Wagner had also said that Natalie had probably taken the dinghy out to go party hopping, yet the actress was wearing her nightgown and slippers.
In 2011, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department reopened the instance, interviewing other key witnesses, whom the original detectives never bothered pursuing. The book mentions ane woman who talked to the press shortly after Wood's death — subsequently trying to contact the constabulary several times — so received a threatening annotation saying, "If yous value your life, keep serenity most what you lot know."
A coroner found that Natalie had fresh bruises on her trunk that didn't look like they were from the boat but from a person.
Lana writes in her book that she believes Wagner and Natalie had an "alcohol-fueled statement" that "escalated into a physical confrontation" and that Wagner "delivered a blow to the left side of Natalie'due south face that knocked her unconscious."
"I believe," she writes, "that all of a sudden, panic-stricken when he realized what he'd done, R.J. made the fatal decision to put Natalie in the water to avoid being held responsible for what had happened."
The volume speculates that Wagner sent Davern — who had come up to intervene — to look for the "missing" Natalie "to give himself fourth dimension to untie the dinghy." Davern said in his testimonial that Wagner did tell him not to turn the searchlights on or to call the authorities until ii hours later, and Lana writes that she believes that he did this to "[cover] up the fact that, in a drunken, jealous, rage-filled moment, he'd ended the life of Natalie Wood."
Nonetheless, Lana said she didn't write the volume to bring down her brother-in-police.
"Wagner is not going to jail. He'south not going to be arrested. He'due south not going to admit anything," Lana explained. "All I can do is effort to have people understand the truth, and to prove Natalie as she really was."
Source: https://nypost.com/2021/11/04/natalie-woods-sister-says-robert-wagner-killed-the-actress/
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