“I want her to know that I’m here for her now.”
—Lana Wood, on her sister Natalie ask to run the dialogue by her,” says Lana, who co-starred on the prime-time soap opera Peyton Place in the 1960s. “The only time we weren’t glued together and talking about things other than just superficial stuff, were the years when she was married to [Robert Wagner]. Those were the times when she seemed almost disengaged.”
TRAGIC SECRETS
As Lana reveals in her new book, Natalie didn’t tell her she’d been brutally raped at age 16 by actor Kirk Douglas until many years after it occurred. “She tried to put it aside, but I think it made her more weary than she should have been,” says Lana, who was about 22 when Natalie finally confided in her. “It affected her deeply. Natalie was trying very hard through her therapy to come to terms with some of the issues she felt she had.”
Natalie didn’t like to talk about her marriage to Robert, whom they all called RJ. The couple initially were wed from 1957 to 1962 before splitting up for a decade. In 1972, Natalie and RJ remarried during a ceremony aboard a yacht anchored off the coast of Malibu, shortly after she ended her threeyear union with British producer Richard Gregson. “I didn’t feel good about her second marriage. I openly protested,” admits Lana, who says she never really felt close to her brother-in-law Robert. “I didn’t really engage RJ in anything when I was at their house. It was always just me and Natalie doing things together, but never RJ,” she says. “Perhaps I am to blame for some of that.”
Earlier in her life, Natalie dated some famous men, including Elvis Presley, Warren Beatty and David Niven Jr., but she never confessed to Lana that any of them were the love of her life. Nor did she proclaim her love for RJ. “She never said to me, ‘I can’t live without him,’ or, ‘We are meant to be together,’” says Lana, who felt confused by their marriage. “A psychic once told me that they were together in another life, and it didn’t end well, and they keep trying to make it right,” she says.
On that terrible weekend 40 years ago, Natalie and RJ had been entertaining her co-star Christopher Walken aboard their yacht Splendor.
The boat’s captain testified the couple argued. RJ says Natalie was not in their cabin when he went to sleep. Sometime in the night, she and the boat’s dinghy went missing.
Natalie’s bruised body, still clad in her nightgown, was found in the water the next day, not far from the missing dinghy. It was never determined how the actress, whose blood alcohol was .14, had entered the water. Lana has always maintained that Natalie was terrified of the ocean and would never go out in a small boat alone at night. “Lt. John Corina in homicide had a very apt remark. He said, ‘All we know is that there were two people on the back of that boat and they were arguing, and then there was one,’” says Lana.
The passage of time hasn’t stopped Lana from wanting answers. “If I could talk to Natalie now, I would say, ‘I will do everything in my power to clear your name, your motives, and to explain who you really were,’” she says. “And I won’t stop until we get the truth.”