by Helen Barlow
Ever since Natalie Wood died at the age of 43 while holidaying on her boat over the 1981 Thanksgiving weekend, the circumstances surrounding her death – did she drown or was she pushed? – have overshadowed the powerhouse woman that she was.
An entire generation of young women hardly know the sensual, down-to-earth, thrice Oscar nominated star of West Side Story, Rebel Without a Cause and Splendour in the Grass, so a new documentary Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind will prove illuminating.
A pioneer of championing women’s and LGBTQ rights, Wood, at the height of her Hollywood power, kick-started the screen career of Robert Redford (her co-star in Inside Daisy Clover and This Property is Condemned) and was forward-thinking in her ideas on family, acting as the glue that cemented her own children with those of her two husbands, powerful Hollywood agent Richard Gregson and fellow star Robert Wagner, who she married twice.
The film, directed by Laurent Bouzereau (Five Came Back), is told from the point of view of her daughter Natasha Gregson Wagner, the biological daughter of Gregson and the beloved stepdaughter of Wagner. Natasha, 49, considers both men as her parents and has also written a book, More Than Love, to tell the story of her mother.
I’d first met the then actress when she was promoting her 1997 movie Two Girls and A Guy where she co-starred with Robert Downey Jr.. After she became a mum, she decided to concentrate on raising her daughter, Clover, now seven, and on producing this film as well as writing. Does she think being an actress was too difficult?
“I really do, but it seems like it’s changing a lot,” she responds. “One of the things I hope audiences get from our documentary was how much my mum fought for equal rights and equal pay with her male co-stars. She was at one point much more powerful than her male co-stars, so I’m hoping that people will learn that from her. I think if she were here today, she’d be leading the charge with #MeToo.”
Natasha was eleven when her mum died. What does she miss about her? “I miss her voice – she had the most amazing voice – and her laugh, she loved to laugh. I miss the way she championed me. I’m sad she never got to meet my daughter. I spent a long time feeling motherless and really wanted to be a mother myself.”
The child of Russian immigrants and the daughter of a notorious stage mother, Natalie was discovered in 1941 and put into films at the age of four, adopting the surname of one of her first directors, Sam Wood. She had a plucky believability, not unlike Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, and made her mark in films like Miracle on 34th Street and co-starred with Bette Davis in The Star. Unlike Garland though, she stood up to the men in power and Jack Warner suspended her for 18 months when she insisted on having a say in her roles. He gave in and she made West Side Story.
Natalie had many famous affairs, at the age of 16 with Rebel Without A Cause director Nicholas Ray and she was together with her Splendour in the Grass co-star Warren Beatty for a tumultuous two years. She dated Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra, though, as the trade bible Variety notes, the documentary fails to mention how she was allegedly raped at the age of 15 by a major Hollywood star.
After surviving the ravages of Hollywood, with the help of a lot of therapy, Natalie wanted to focus on motherhood. Natasha was keen to reclaim her mother’s story and in 2016 started out by creating a fragrance, Natalie, together with her younger sister Courtney, before producing the documentary and writing her book.
“The documentary is very much about my mum and the book is a deeper dive into my grieving process, my relationship with my mum and what it’s like to be a motherless daughter,” she explains.
Dressed in a bright pink sweater, Natasha is chirpy in our interview, even if she tears up when talking of her mother’s still unresolved death and the controversies it has generated.
“I started to realise Clover was going to inherit her grandmother’s legacy and I wanted it to be a cleaner one, a more concise one than has been out in the world. I felt I needed to take a bit of control of the narrative and reframe things. I want my mum to be remembered for her life and not the night that she died. There is so much about my mum that people didn’t know until this documentary, what an incredible force of nature she was. She may have looked tiny and delicate and beautiful, but you do not mess with that woman! And I don’t know that everyone knew that about her.”
While Natasha notes how even she was surprised by some of the unseen footage and photographs in the film, her other motivation for instigating the project was to vindicate her “Daddy Wagner”, now 90. In 2011, after new information came from the boat’s captain Dennis Davern, who said he’d originally lied to the police – in the revised scenario that he presented, he claimed that Wagner was responsible for Wood’s death – Natalie’s case was re-opened. In 2018, Wagner was named a “person of interest” in the drowning, which had been upgraded from “accidental” to “undetermined”.
“I’m incredibly protective of my stepfather and it is very painful having these accusations come out against him,” Natasha says. “As you can see in the film, he is all heart and he is full of love and elegance. It was very brave of him to come on this journey with Laurent and me.”
Was it hard to make him participate in the film?
“My Dad will pretty much do whatever I tell him,” she responds with a laugh. “He met Laurent and had a lot of conversations and on the two days we shot the interview, it was hard. It was a painful, challenging couple of days, but my Dad is brave and he’s game. He sat down and talked with us because he felt safe and he had nothing to hide.”
Wagner recalls how on that fateful night on their boat he had been together with his wife and Christopher Walken, her co-star on Brainstorm, a film they were shooting at the time. When later alone with Walken, the pair had argued. The Deer Hunter star maintained that Natalie should be working more, but Wagner balked at the suggestion and in the documentary, he admits that he smashed a wine bottle on the table. When Wagner discovered his wife was gone, he called the coastguard.
What does Natasha think happened?
“What I think happened is in the movie.”
As for her mother going back to work, she says, “At that time I was eleven and Courtney was seven and our mum felt like we were up and running and it would be okay if she started to work more. As my stepbrother Joshua Donan says so eloquently in the film, Chris represented the work and my dad represented the home and that was exactly what she was struggling with. Had that [tragedy] not happened, she would have woken up the next morning, had coffee with them, gone home and my parents would have talked about it more. They would have maybe gone to couples’ therapy and figured it out. In every marriage we have these roadblocks. She probably would have even talked about it to me. ‘Natooshie I want to start acting again more. How do you feel about that?’ She constantly wanted to talk about everything with us. I think that is the sad part. She was struggling with something before she died and was unable to resolve it.”
Natasha says she has learned to deal with the media speculation.
“It’s something that’s been going on since my mother’s death and while it is bothersome and painful, specifically when they talk about my dad, I have learned how to block it out and it isn’t something I ever read. Most of it is so preposterous it doesn’t even touch my reality.”
How does it affect her that there is no answer?
“For me, it’s just the loss of her. I know she drowned, and it was an accident. The particulars of it have never haunted me or been something that I’ve needed to know.”
Perking up at the end of our interview at the mention of her handsome actor husband Barry Watson (Gossip Girl), Natasha notes how he played Lachlan Murdoch in The Loudest Voice alongside Russell Crowe.
“Barry didn’t meet Lachlan, but Russell knows Lachlan quite well. So, he guided Barry a lot with the performance. Russell was really good to Barry.”
Interestingly she keeps in touch with Downey Jr.. I note that people used to think he was going to die at one point.
“I know,” she responds. “I think he is never to be underestimated. He’s amazing actually. He had his son Exton right at the time I had my daughter, so they were at each other’s first birthday parties. He and I had a really nice relationship and we’ve always been friends.”
Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind is screening on Fox Showcase on Wednesday, May 6 at 8.30pm and will stream on Foxtel Now.
