Natasha Gregson Wagner was 11 when her mother, the Oscar-nominated actor Natalie Wood, drowned off Catalina Island. In the 39 years since, Gregson Wagner—an actress herself who has appeared in projects including High Fidelity and Two Girls and a Guy—has not only grappled with that trauma, but with the cyclical interest in Wood’s death—and the suspicion around her stepfather Robert Wagner, now 90, who was on board the 55-foot yacht Splendour the night Wood drowned.
In a new documentary Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind—premiering May 5 on HBO—Gregson Wagner sits down with her stepfather, who largely raised her, to interview him about that tragic night. The interview, filmed inside her airy Los Angeles home, is just one segment in a stunning tribute to Wood’s abridged life—full of previously unseen home movies, family photographs, film highlights, and loving memories from Gregson Wagner; her sister, Courtney; Gregson Wagner’s father and Wood’s second husband, Richard Gregson; Robert Redford; and Mia Farrow, among others. (Gregson Wagner has previously paid homage to her mother by creating a gardenia-based perfume called Natalie, and co-authoring a 2016 biographical coffee table book, Natalie Wood: Reflections on a Legendary Life.)
It has always bothered Gregson Wagner that her mother is remembered more for her death than for her accomplishments in life. In addition to Wood’s three Oscar nominations (for 1955’s Rebel Without a Cause, 1961’s Splendor in the Grass, and 1963’s Love With the Proper Stranger), Wood was a devoted mother to Gregson Wagner and Courtney, and an empowered star who leveraged her profile to handpick her roles and costars including Redford—the then-unknown she pushed to be cast in 1965’s Inside Daisy Clover. Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind portrays Wood as a spirited, loving parent who was able to overcome an overbearing mother of her own and the stress of child stardom—with the help of psychoanalysis, of which she was an early proponent—to forge a fulfilling career and family life.
Still, Gregson Wagner, who produced the documentary, and director Laurent Bouzereau knew that the film would need to address Wood’s death head-on to help audiences process it, hopefully once and for all. Knowing how crucial the conversation with Wagner would be to the project, Gregson Wagner and Bouzereau shot that portion first. “If we didn’t get what we were hoping we would get,” Bouzereau told Vanity Fair, the project may not have happened. Gregson Wagner knows that suspicions have shadowed her stepfather over the past four decades: “I do really hope that this [documentary] ends some of that nonsense,” she told Vanity Fair.
New details about the case and a surge in true-crime interest have rekindled fascination in this unsolved Hollywood mystery, particularly in recent years. In 2011, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department reopened its investigation into Wood’s death, after Splendour captain Dennis Davern claimed he had heard Wood and Wagner arguing the night of Wood’s death. Later, the coroner changed Wood’s cause of death to “drowning and other undetermined factors.” New witnesses led police to reclassify Wood’s death as “suspicious.” In 2018, Wagner was named a person of interest by the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. And Natalie’s own sister, Lana Wood—deemed a credible source by detectives—has spent years publicly sharing her doubts that Wood’s death was an accident and demanding that Wagner, her brother in-law, “tell the truth for once and for all.”
In Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind, Gregson Wagner asks her stepfather to explain what happened the evening Wood fell off the boat. Wagner, in turn, recounts the final voyage he took with Wood, during Thanksgiving weekend 1981—with Dennis Davern and Christopher Walken, Wood’s costar in the 1983 sci-fi film Brainstorm. (Gregson Wagner told Vanity Fair that she asked both Walken and Lana Wood to participate in the documentary, but both declined. While Lana has been vocal about her sister’s death—even participating in the recent podcast Fatal Voyage: The Mysterious Death Of Natalie Wood—Walken has largely avoided commenting upon it. When People brought up Wood’s death in a 1986 interview, the actor responded by snapping, “I don’t know what happened. She slipped and fell in the water. I was in bed then. It was a terrible thing. Look, we’re in a conversation I won’t have. It’s a ——ing bore.”)
The film shows Wagner remembering his final dinner with Wood and Walken, during which Wagner says he enjoyed “a few glasses of vino.” Wagner and Wood had been having conversations about Wood’s career at that point—debating whether she should continue acting, or step away from the screen to spend more time at home with her children. Speaking to his stepdaughter, Wagner recalls opening another bottle of wine, and Wood retiring to bed. Awake with Walken and feeling “high” from the alcohol, Wagner says that Walken then told him that he believed Wood, a brilliant actor, needed to continue acting. Wagner says he angrily told Walken to mind his own business, before “smashing a wine bottle.” Wagner says that he and Walken eventually resolved the argument. After Walken retired to bed, Wagner says that he and Davern swept up the broken bottle on the floor. Then Wagner went downstairs, discovered that Wood was missing, and notified the coast guard.
