The girl she left behind
Heartbroken daughter pays tribute to a movie star mother lost at sea
More Than Love Natasha Gregson Wagner Scribner
As a child, Natasha Gregson Wagner followed a succession of good-luck rituals every time her mother left the house. “I couldn’t go to sleep until all 20 or 30 of my stuffed animals were lined up in a row on my brass bed, my Barbies perfectly positioned in their Barbie Dreamhouse. As soon as I finished brushing my teeth and turned the bathroom lights off, I had to switch on my swan nightlight. I prayed every night, ‘Now I lay me down to sleep,’ including a special prayer to God to please keep my mom safe,” she writes in her new memoir, More Than Love.
The mom, of course, was Natalie Wood, and the book, released in conjunction with a family-approved HBO documentary, is at once a poignant look at a complicated relationship, a knowledgeable exercise in brand management and a tantalizing foray into “What if?”
For it was 11-year-old Natasha who, in November 1981, begged her mother not to take that ill-fated boat trip to Catalina Island. We all know what happened: In the middle of the night, Wood tumbled to her death from the yacht she shared with husband Robert Wagner, Natasha’s stepfather. Officially, she slipped and drowned while trying to reach the boat’s dinghy. But the rumours were already in full churn. Was Wood’s death a tragic accident or foul play?
Speculation aside, few of us gave a thought to the girl she left behind. “Losing my mother was the defining moment of my life,” she writes now. “No other event would ever again so sharply etch its mark upon my soul, or so completely colour the way I navigate the world, or leave my heart quite as broken.”
To an outsider, Gregson Wagner’s childhood would have looked like a cocoon of Beverly
Hills privilege. Wood and Wagner married young, divorced, had children with other spouses, then remarried. How differently her mother came up in the world. The daughter of penniless Russian immigrants, she discovered at a young age a talent for playing make-believe on camera. From middle school onward, she was her family’s sole breadwinner.
That pressure left its own cracks in Wood’s psyche. On at least one occasion, she attempted suicide, and she sometimes drank. (Alcohol was reportedly one of the factors in her death.)
Our author douses the conspiracy embers that still swirl around her mother’s death. “... I focus on the things I do know, that as certain as I am that the earth is round, my father (i.e., Wagner) would never have harmed my mother or failed to save her if he knew she was in danger.”
Give all due credit to the author’s sincerity and loyalty, but don’t ignore the imperatives of image control. And marvel that, four decades after Wood’s death, her brand is still selling, and she herself is still hard at work.
The Washington Post