splendour yacht natalie wood

The yacht tied to actress Natalie Wood’s mysterious 1981 death is out of Oahu waters

HONOLULU, Hawaii (HawaiiNewsNow) - A boat that was once a crucial piece of evidence in a Hollywood homicide investigation has finally been removed from Honolulu waters.

The yacht “Splendour” is now a sitting scrap heap. On Tuesday, the state hauled the vessel from the Ala Wai Harbor. It’s been sitting there unused for over 20 years as it changed owners.

But it was once owned by actor Robert Wagner who was questioned in 1981 following the death of his wife, actress Natalie Wood.

Wood is said to have fallen from the boat one night, yet conflicting witness statements from Wagner, actor Christopher Walken, and the boat’s captain led to an extensive investigation.

For years, her death was classified as an accident until new witnesses emerged and the case was reopened in 2011. Authorities now consider Wagner a person of interest.

The vessel itself has racked up nearly $12,000 in illegal mooring fees, and it will cost the state almost $14,500 to get rid of the yacht.

The DLNR adds that the boat was in extremely poor condition and was in danger of sinking.

To this day, no one has ever been arrested in connection to Wood’s death.

Copyright 2020 Hawaii News Now. All rights reserved.

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What Happened To The Splendour Yacht?

Table of Contents:

The state has demolished the derelict yacht Splendour, which was moored at Ala Wai Small Boat Harbor for two decades. The wreckage occurred on November 30, 1981, when actress Natalie Wood and actor Christopher Walken were vacationing aboard the 55-foot yacht, Splendour. The yacht was reportedly a 1960 58 Bristol Boat made by the Allen Quimby Veneer Company out of Bristol, Maine. Wood and Wagner boarded their 18-meter motor yacht on November 28, 1981, for a weekend trip to Santa Catalina Island off the coast of California.

The incident occurred after Wood went missing from her family’s yacht, Splendour. The captain of the yacht revealed that Wood and Walken had been flirting throughout the weekend and that things turned nasty after returning. Prince Valiant, the 13-foot inflatable dinghy belonging to Splendour, washed up on the rocks, its ignition key switched to off, and the gearshift in neutral.

Wood’s body was found floating in Wood and Wagner’s boat, Splendour, about a mile south of the couple’s yacht, off an isolated cove known as Blue Cavern Point. The wreckage marks the end of a more than 20-year journey, with Wood and Wagner’s boat being the last to be moored at Ala Wai Small Boat Harbor.

📹 Take a Tour Inside Natalie Wood’s Infamous “Splendour”

Tour the “Splendour” that was owned by Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner. Now owned by Ron Nelson and docked in Honolulu, …

Was Natalie Wood ever found?

Wood was found floating in the water, wearing a flannel nightgown and down jacket. On Dec. 1, 1981, Variety headlined that it was ruled “accidental.” L.A. County coroner Thomas Noguchi theorized she had been trying to board an inflatable dinghy and missed her step. He said “her intoxication was one of the factors involved in her inability to respond to an emergency situation.”

Among the questions were why she would get on a dinghy on a cold, rainy night, whether she and Wagner had been fighting that evening and why there were so many bruises on her body and arms.

As Variety predicted, the speculation and questions continued for decades, fueled by the tabloids.

What is the most expensive privately owned yacht?

How Much Is The World’s Most Expensive Yacht?1) History Supreme ($4.8 billion)2) Eclipse ($1.5 billion)3) Streets Of Monaco ($1 billion)4) Azzam ($600 million)5) Motor Yacht A+ (old name Topaz) ($527 million)6) Motor Yacht A ($440 million)7) Dubai ($440 million)8) Radiant ($320 million)

The 10 Most Expensive Yachts in the World. Yachts are indispensable vehicles of the summer season, especially appealing to sea lovers. We can say that it is possible to find suitable for every budget for these beautiful vehicles that make life even more beautiful. However, in this article, let’s escape to some luxury and take a look at the list of the 10 most expensive yachts in the world in 2022. In addition, some of the following yachts are mentioned in our article named Top 10 World’s Biggest Yachts in 2021.

How Much Is The World’s Most Expensive Yacht?. Luxury yachts are offered for sale at high prices in direct proportion to the opportunities they provide. So, how much is the most expensive yacht in the world?

The History Supreme, currently known as the most expensive yacht in the world, is valued at $4.8 billion. Although the price is astonishing, those who hear its features think that it is definitely worth it.

What happened to Splendour of the Seas?

In March 2015, Royal Caribbean sold Splendour of the Seas to TUI Cruises who was then sub-chartered to Thomson Cruises, with the final sailing for Royal Caribbean departing on 4 April 2016. The ship was renamed TUI Discovery and was based in Palma, Mallorca and Bridgetown, Barbados starting in June 2016 after refurbishment. She was originally going to be renamed Thomson Discovery, but the name was changed to TUI Discovery as part of their rebranding.

On 22 October 2015 whilst sailing on a cruise in the Mediterranean, Splendour of the Seas suffered an engine-room fire, which was extinguished after 2 hours by the crew. There were no injuries reported by Royal Caribbean and the ship continued its journey to the port of Venice.

Splendour of the Seas spent her last season with Royal Caribbean International by sailing from Dubai on 7-8 night cruises, visiting destinations such as Muscat, Oman and Abu Dhabi throughout November 2015 – March 2016.

Did Robert Wagner inherit Natalie Woods’ money?

“Wagner’s Share: Assets and Allegations”. Robert Wagner, Wood’s husband, inherited half of her estate along with specific items like a Bonnard oil painting and her jewelry. Despite these bequests, controversy and family disputes arose, particularly from Wood’s younger sister, Lana Wood, who claimed her share with a surprising immediacy.

“Siblings and Sisters: A Tale of Bequeaths”. Wood ensured her siblings received their share, leaving her luxurious clothing, including furs, to her younger sister Lana. Her older sister, Olga, received a lump sum, while her mother, Maria Gurdin, was guaranteed an annual income deducted from her children’s trust.

“The Tell-All Fallout: Lana Wood’s Inheritance Drama”. Lana Wood’s assertive claim to her inheritance, taking even undergarments, sparked family tensions. Her subsequent tell-all book, deemed sensational and gossip-laden, led to severed ties with both Wagner and Wood families.

What is the largest privately owned yacht in the world?

Azzam Azzam (597 ft) Azzam holds the title of largest privately owned superyacht, a position it has maintained since it was completed at a cost of $600 million by Lürssen Yachts in Lemwerder, Germany, ten years ago.

Measuring upwards of 533 feet, these vessels start at the equivalent length of roughly a 50-story building.

Yachts, as with most other things connected to the ultrarich—apartments, shopping sprees, bank accounts—are getting bigger. And while price, nautically speaking, usually scales with size, that’s not always the case. So there’s, oddly enough, less overlap between this list and our recent list of theWorld’s Most Expensive Superyachts than one might expect.

There are reasons behind this. Interestingly, some of the biggest superyachts in the world have become so stunningly large that they can no longer maintain status as belonging to a single family or dynasty. The largest ones have become condominiums or charterable research vessels—playthings for the ultrawealthy.

What happened to Robert Wagner’s yacht?

The investigator’s report attached to Noguchi’s document said that Wood and a small party that included her husband, Robert Wagner, had left the Splendour for a restaurant dinner on Catalina Island. At about 10 p.m., the “intoxicated” group returned to the yacht, using its dinghy, Valiant. Robert Wagner told the investigators that Natalie retired for the night in the couple’s cabin at about 10:45, but after talking for a while longer with their guest, Natalie’s co-star at the time Christopher Walken, Wagner went to join her in the cabin, only to find her missing.

Wagner and the others soon discovered the dinghy was also missing, and they “immediately” radioed for help. Harbor Patrol, private searchers, and eventually the Coast Guard all combed the water and island coastline, and a Sheriff’s Department helicopter eventually spotted Natalie’s floating body. She was pronounced dead at 7:44 a.m. on November 29th.

Wood’s funeral, held on December 3rd, showed a devastated, weeping Wagner, surrounded by friends, family, and the cream of the entertainment world: Laurence Olivier, Frank Sinatra, Gregory Peck, and Rock Hudson.

Who owns the Splendor cruise ship?

Carnival SplendorHistoryOwnerCarnival Corporation & plcOperatorCarnival Cruise LinePort of registryPanamaRouteAustralia.

• Call sign: 3EUS
• IMO number:9333163
• MMSI no.: 372808000
• Diesel-electric
• Converteam propulsion motors (2×21MW)

Carnival Splendor is a Concordia-class cruise ship operated by Carnival Cruise Line. As she is the only Concordia-class ship in the Carnival fleet, she is also referred to as a Splendor-class ship. Her other sister ships are part of the Costa Crociere fleet. The ship was originally designed and ordered for Costa Cruises but she was transferred to Carnival Cruise Line during construction.

What happened to Jeff Bezos yacht?

First, Jeff Bezos’ new megayacht was too big to pass under a bridge in the Netherlands. Now, the massive vessel’s size — it’s more than 400 feet long — has played a role in preventing it from keeping company with other private yachts in Port Everglades, Fla., where it is anchored.

Instead, the megayacht, named Koru, is hanging with huge oil tankers and general container ships. The yacht is docked there because of its size and also because of what berths were available in the seaport, according to a spokeswoman for Port Everglades.

Koru is a sailing yacht, unlike the much bigger diesel-powered boats popular with other billionaires. It is the largest sailing yacht in the world, according to Oceanco, the Dutch company that finished building the boat earlier this year.

Who was at Natalie Woods funeral?

As pallbearers brought the casket to the site. Eulogies were delivered by hope Lang screenwriter tommy Thompson and roddy mcdowall. To think that one pretty. Individual.

Where is the boat splendour now?

In 2020 the Splendour, then at the Ala Wai, had racked up over $12,000 in mooring fees and was in poor condition and in danger of sinking. The boat was impounded in December and demolished in January, ending the 60-year saga of the Splendour.

Who owns the splendor yacht?

The owner of the yacht where Natalie Wood spent her final moments has put it on the market after claiming the actress still haunts the decks.

Ron Nelson bought The Splendour in 1986, five years after the West Side Story actress mysteriously drowned off the coast of Catalina Island.

But now, 28 years later, he has revealed the force of Wood’s spirit is too strong, forcing him to get rid of it altogether.

Haunted? The new owner of The Splendour claims Natalie Wood still haunts the yacht 33 years after she died.

What happened with Splendour?

The promoters of Splendour, the Secret Sounds Group, which is 63 per cent-owned by multinational Live Nation, officially announced the July festival’s cancellation on Wednesday afternoon. “Due to unexpected events, we’ll be taking the year off,” its statement said. “We will be working hard to be back in future years.”

📹 Why Yacht Captain Says He Believes Natalie Wood Was ‘Dead When She Hit The Water’

The man who captained the yacht the night Natalie Wood drowned says he thinks she was dead “When she hit the water.” Dr. Phil …

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Debbie Green

I am a school teacher who was bitten by the travel bug many decades ago. My husband Billy has come along for the ride and now shares my dream to travel the world with our three children.The kids Pollyanna, 13, Cooper, 12 and Tommy 9 are in love with plane trips (thank goodness) and discovering new places, experiences and of course Disneyland.

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Yacht tied to Natalie Wood’s drowning removed from harbor

By Star-Advertiser staff

Jan. 30, 2020

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BRUCE ASATO / [email protected]

The derelict yacht Splendour, moored at Ala Wai Small Boat Harbor for two decades, was destroyed Tuesday. Actress Natalie Wood was vacationing aboard the yacht at the time of her death in 1981.

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Splendour, a 55-foot yacht connected with the 1981 drowning death of actress Natalie Wood, was demolished Tuesday, ending a more than 20-year run in the Ala Wai Small Boat Harbor.

The vessel has been in the harbor under different ownership for more than 20 years, said Meghan Statts, assistant administrator for the Division of Boating and Ocean Recreation, part of the state Department of Land and Natural Resources. The current owner had illegally moored it in the harbor since June, racking up $12,000 in mooring fees, Statts said.

DOBOR impounded the vessel on Dec. 23, Statts said.

“The owner has not taken responsibility for the vessel, and the State Boating Fund will pay the cost for the disposal,” she said. “The cost is $14,491. The vessel has numerous structural issues and large holes in the hull. The vessel is in extremely poor condition and has been in danger of sinking.”

A large hole could be seen in the boat’s hull on Tuesday. Workers from JS International Inc. salvaged what they could before dismantling and demolishing the boat. Pieces of plywood held the hull of the boat together so it could be moved across the harbor.

The yacht once belonged to Wood’s husband, actor Robert Wagner. Prior to Wood’s drowning, the couple had spent Thanksgiving weekend on the yacht floating off Catalina Island. Their friend, actor Christopher Walken, and the boat’s captain, Dennis Davern, were also aboard.

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Wood’s body was found floating off Catalina Island on the morning of Nov. 29, 1981. Her death was ruled accidental, but in 2011 the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department reopened the investigation. Wood’s death certificate was amended in 2012 to list the cause of death as “drowning and other undetermined factors.”

In 2018, Los Angeles County homicide detectives named Wagner a “person of interest” in the case.

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Owner of ‘Splendour’, the Yacht Once Owned by Hollywood Stars Natalie Wood and her husband Robert Wagner, Becomes Instant Celebrity

The Honolulu resident, who has had a mooring permit in the a small boat harbor in Honolulu, is the owner of the Splendour , a yacht once owned by Hollywood stars Natalie Wood and her husband Robert Wagner.

The yacht, which will soon be inspected by Los Angeles investigators, may be a key part of the investigation reopened yesterday into the 1981 drowning death of Wood.

Reached by phone today, his wife said a number of media outlets are asking for interviews.

The Los Angeles Police Department said today in a press conference that using new DNA technology, investigators will examine the boat that Wood, Wagner and their friend Christopher Walken were on the night the actress died 30 years ago. They have not disclosed what they expect to find.

The boat captain Dennis Davern, who was with the trio the night Wood fell off the boat and drown, alleges that Wagner is responsible for Wood’s death and that he lied for Wagner in the past as a part of a cover up.

This comes as 48 Hour Mysteries and Vanity Fair magazine are about to release a special investigative report on the star’s demise.

48 Hours Presents Vanity Fair: Hollywood Scandal airs Saturday, Nov. 19 at 10 p.m. ET/PT on CBS, the network’s web site said.

Police so far maintain that Wagner is not a target of the investigation.

However, Wood’s sister also claims Wagner is responsible for the beloved star’s death.

She told TMZ  that Wagner  “left her to drown” and told the captain to ‘Leave her there, teach her a lesson.”

The captain said publicly today that he was prevented by Wagner from calling the U.S. Coast Guard for four hours.

Reports are that Wood, Wagner and Walken were drinking heavily that night, and Wood and Wagner had a volatile fight over whether Walken wanted to sleep with her. The captain claims to have turned up his music so he would not have to hear them argue.

The question police have to answer now is whether Wood fell, or slipped trying to get off the boat into a smaller dingy, or was pushed into the water while they were sailing off of Catalina Island.

Marti Rulli, who authored “ Goodbye Natalie, Goodbye Splendour” in September 2009 could not be reached for comment, but her investigation – and the other new publicity surrounding her death – may have contributed to police reopening the case.

Wagner has not made a statement about the LA police department’s decision.

A source close to the Wagner family told Hawaii Reporter that Wagner has been cooperating with the police and they don’t believe the captain’s story is credible.

A statement released from Wagner’s publicist is similar: “We trust they will evaluate whether any new information relating to the death of Natalie Wood Wagner is valid, and that it comes from a credible source or sources other than those simply trying to profit from the 30-year anniversary of her tragic death.”

Wood, who was nominated three times for Oscars for her roles in West Side Story and Rebel with out a Cause , also starred  as a child in such films as the Christmas classic Miracle On 34th Street and The Ghost And Mrs. Muir .

Meanwhile when the Los Angeles police will arrive in Honolulu is part of the mystery – at least for now.

Honolulu Police Department has not been contacted so far by Los Angeles authorities to aid in the investigation, according to Caroline Sluyter, spokesperson for HPD.

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Owner of yacht which Natalie Wood died on 28 years ago puts it up for sale claiming it's 'haunted' by West Side Story star

• Natalie Wood 'haunts The Splendour yacht' where she was last seen alive
• Ron Nelson bought it in 1986 but claims spirit is increasingly present
• He said he has experienced 'weird falls' and 'ghost sat on my bed'
• West Side Story actress Wood drowned in 1981 after being aboard 

By MIA DE GRAAF FOR MAILONLINE

Published: 17:22 EST, 1 November 2014 | Updated: 18:39 EST, 1 November 2014

View comments

The owner of the yacht where Natalie Wood spent her final moments has put it on the market after claiming the actress still haunts the decks. 

Ron Nelson bought The Splendour in 1986, five years after the West Side Story actress mysteriously drowned off the coast of Catalina Island.

But now, 28 years later, he has revealed the force of Wood's spirit is too strong, forcing him to get rid of it altogether. 

Scroll down for video 

Haunted? The new owner of The Splendour claims Natalie Wood still haunts the yacht 33 years after she died

Mystery: Wood drowned in November 1981 after being on the yacht with her husband Robert Wagner

The numerous 'supernatural' incidents include a number of 'weird falls', he told the National Enquirer .

'It’s just like my feet came out from under me and I fell,' he explained. 

Another time a being sat on his bed: 'Something sat down on the bed and then left.'

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And during the recent Hurricane Ana, The Splendour became suspiciously waterlogged, he said. 

In 2011, Nelson, a former United Airlines flight attendant, admitted to Hawaii's KITV.com that 'there's been a lot of strange things that have happened on the boat.'

He even had the yacht blessed by two Hawaiian kahunas - a kind of shaman - to clean teh boat's spirit.

Incidents? Ron Nelson, who bought the boat in 1986, claims he has had a number of 'weird falls' on board

'Ghost': Nelson said he was lying in bed one night and a spirit came and sat on the bed then left

But despite his efforts, he says, it is unbearable.

He hopes a museum will buy The Splendour to preserve it.

The stateroom contains many of the same tiles, the same blue bed remains in exactly the same spot and the initials WW are still etched into the captain's seat.

Nelson bought the boat from Robert Wagner, Wood's husband.

He carried out small renovations, before taking two friends on a trip to Catalina Island, where the actress died. He said it was a 'last goodbye to Natalie'.

Afterwards, they made the two week trip to Hawaii where he has spent 10 years restoring the boat. He said he was now almost ready to begin chartering voyages.

Hurricane: The boat became waterlogged after the recent Hurricane Ana - the last straw for spooked Nelson

Blessed but still haunted: Nelson got two Hawaiian shaman to cleanse the boat but it is 'still haunted', he says

He said he tried to keep his makeover as close to the original as possible, and has kept the stateroom with the blue bed, dubbed 'Natalie's Room', and most of the tiles.

The initials WW are still etched onto the captain's seat, just as they were when Wagner and Natalie owned the boat.

Nelson said the 60ft boat's history was one of the reasons why he bought it, and told Hawaii's KITV.com said: 'I have read pretty much every article ever written about her death.' 

Share or comment on this article: Yacht where Natalie Wood mysteriously drowned up for sale as new owner claims West Side Story actress 'haunts it' 

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Natalie Wood’s Fatal Voyage

I found my love in Avalon beside the bay, I left my love in Avalon and sail’d away. —From the song “Avalon,” made popular by Al Jolson.

‘This is the Splendour, needs help.” With those words, 51-year-old actor Robert Wagner and Dennis Davern, the captain of Splendour, sounded the alarm around 1:30 A.M., on November 29, 1981, that Wagner’s wife, Natalie Wood, had disappeared from the 60-foot yacht the couple owned. Approximately six hours later, Wood’s body, clad in only a flannel nightgown, red down jacket, and blue wool socks, was found floating facedown in the Pacific about a mile away, 200 yards off Blue Cavern Point on Catalina Island. Just to the south, Prince Valiant, the 13-foot inflatable dinghy belonging to Splendour, had washed up on the rocks, its ignition key switched to “off,” the gearshift in neutral, and the oars up in a locked position.

The death of the 43-year-old actress stunned Hollywood. “It’s hard to describe the horror of this thing,” said Fred Astaire, a family friend who had played the father of Wagner’s character from 1968 until 1970 in the popular television series It Takes a Thief. As both the Coroner’s Office and the Sheriff’s Department began to investigate, rumors and questions swirled in Hollywood: What had brought Wood, whose fear of deep water was legendary, to leave the yacht in the middle of a cold, starless night and board the dinghy?

“I’m afraid of water that is dark,” she had told a journalist just weeks before her death.

As the details of the weekend surfaced, the questions multiplied. Wood had invited the actor Christopher Walken , then 38, with whom she had been filming a science-fiction thriller called Brainstorm, to be her guest aboard Splendour over the Thanksgiving weekend. The Wagners, accompanied by Walken and Davern, had sailed to Catalina Island, 22 miles off the California coast, leaving around noon on Friday, November 27. They anchored off Avalon, the island’s main town, and went ashore for shopping and a few beers, leaving Davern behind. The following afternoon they sailed to Isthmus Cove, an isolated spot at the northern end of the island with a tiny community that caters to yachtsmen. They dined that evening at Doug’s Harbor Reef, the only restaurant on the cove. Some of the restaurant’s staff thought the Wagner party was drinking rather heavily and later remembered volatile behavior on Wood’s part. After the group departed, Don Whiting, the restaurant’s manager, warned Kurt Craig, the harbormaster, to keep an eye out for their safety. They boarded Valiant at about 10 and motored back to Splendour .

What happened next, aboard the yacht, has been a subject of continuing speculation and innuendo. What is definitely known is that Wood retired for the evening. Sometime later Wagner went to check on her and discovered that both she and the dinghy were missing.

A few days after the tragedy, John Payne and his girlfriend, Marilyn Wayne, a Los Angeles commodities broker, contacted police to say they had been sleeping aboard a boat, Capricorn, which was moored near Splendour that night. Around midnight Payne heard a woman yelling, “Help me, someone please help me!” The voice was coming from near the stern of Splendour and, Payne believed, from someone in a dinghy. He awakened Wayne, who heard the cries, too. The couple claimed they hadn’t responded because a loud, drunken party was raging on another nearby yacht, and they had thought someone was just “playing around.” Indeed, they had heard a man’s very drunken voice respond mockingly, “O.K., honey, we’ll get you.” They believed the voice belonged to someone at the party, which evidently reinforced their notion that the whole thing was a joke.

The public face in the ensuing investigations was that of Thomas Noguchi, chief medical examiner in the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office. The autopsy revealed that Wood had died of drowning, and that her body had “superficial skin bruises” on the arms and lower legs and a vertical abrasion on the left cheek, such as might have been caused by falling into the water. The toxicology report showed that her blood-alcohol level was at least .14 percent—.04 percent above the level used in California to determine intoxication in automobile drivers.

At a November 30, 1981, press conference to announce the autopsy results, Noguchi trod gingerly, downplaying Wood’s apparent inebriation at the time of her death and any other sensational aspects of the case. The coroner was already under fire for his handling of the death of actor William Holden, who two weeks earlier had emptied a bottle of vodka in his Santa Monica apartment and then tripped, gashing his forehead on a bedside table. He had bled to death, according to Noguchi, probably because he was too drunk to stanch the wound or call for help. (By a strange coincidence, Holden’s longtime companion was Stefanie Powers, Robert Wagner’s then co-star in the hit television series Hart to Hart. The romantic chemistry on the show had generated speculation about a real-life romance between the two TV stars.) The Hollywood community was outraged that Noguchi had revealed Holden’s drunkenness to the press, feeling it was an invasion of the deceased actor’s privacy.

From the physical evidence in the Wood case Noguchi concluded that the actress had fallen into the water while trying to board the dinghy; fingernail scratches on Valiant’s side showed she had tried to hoist herself up from the water, but since her down jacket would quickly have become waterlogged, she was probably impeded by the extra weight. Evidently she never thought to remove the jacket, perhaps because her judgment was clouded by alcohol. She clung to the dinghy’s side as it drifted away from Splendour and the other boats in the harbor, until, finally, overcome by exhaustion and hypothermia, she drowned.

Before his press conference, Noguchi outlined this theory to his staff, only to have one of his colleagues point out, “What the reporters out there are really interested in, Dr. Noguchi, isn’t so much whether Natalie Wood was intoxicated or not, but why she left the yacht in the middle of the night. ”

Realizing the truth of that statement, Noguchi later wrote, he commissioned a “psychological autopsy” to find out why Wood “felt she should separate herself from her husband and Walken that night.” However, when the report “on the real facts of the death of Natalie Wood” came in, Noguchi “decided not to release the document to the press. It added details the media would only call ‘gory’ and ‘sensational.’ The report did not alter the official coroner’s conclusion of an accidental drowning. So, rather than create more media indignation over ‘too many details,’ I reluctantly filed away that report.”

Noguchi’s discretion failed to save his job; complaints from Frank Sinatra and the Screen Actors Guild, among others, continued to accuse him of sensationalizing his duties. He was demoted on April 27, 1982.

In his 1983 book, Coroner, about his most celebrated cases, Noguchi returned to the mysterious death of Natalie Wood—indeed, he began the book with it. After acknowledging the crucial questions—“Wasn’t it strange that the two men on the yacht didn’t even know that she had left the boat? Hadn’t she spoken to them? Why had she slipped out to the stern of the yacht in the middle of the night, climbed down a ladder, and untied the dinghy? What was she doing? And where was she going? And why?” and also “When she first fell off the swimming step into the water, why didn’t she simply swim a few strokes and reboard the yacht by way of the step? It must have been only a few feet away from her. Even with the heavy jacket, she could have accomplished this effort easily”—he proceeded not to answer any of them. Instead, he spun a dramatic yarn about Wood’s clinging to the dinghy as she attempted to propel it to the beach by kicking her feet.

Through his attorney, Paul Ziffren, and friends, Wagner gave his story, saying that the cruise had been a happy one before ending in the freak accident of Wood’s death. Two years later, Walken spoke for the record. “The people who are convinced that there was something more to it than what came out in the investigation will never be satisfied with the truth. Because the truth is, there is nothing more to it. It was an accident.” Other than that, the two have maintained silence about the incident. (Both declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Doubts about the accident theory have, in fact, never died down, especially in the tabloid press. The principal reason for that is the only other person on the boat that night: Dennis Davern, who claims he has always believed that something more sinister occurred. Davern, now 51, says that the account he gave to police investigators in the days after Wood’s death was incomplete, sanitized, and in some places downright false. Over the years he has offered parts of his story—for money—to various tabloids, and has occasionally appeared on television, most notoriously in February 1992, on Geraldo Rivera’s Now It Can Be Told, when he was filmed without his knowledge discussing an argument aboard Splendour and implying that he knew how Wood got into the water. In the early 1990s he visited New York publishers in an unsuccessful attempt to interest them in a book on the subject.

Despite the fact that Davern is not the most savory witness, he tells a compelling story, one that has been fairly consistent in its various public incarnations even as it has grown with damning details. Now, it seems, widespread interest in the case is about to ignite once again, as two new biographies of Wood are in the works (one by Gavin Lambert with the cooperation of Robert Wagner; another, Natasha: The Biography of Natalie Wood, by Suzanne Finstad, author of several true-crime books).

Recently, Vanity Fair spoke with Dennis Davern and also with Duane Rasure, the lead police investigator on the case. Rasure shared a copy of the police report, which at last gives us crucial details and testimony from all involved. Surprisingly, in almost all instances, the interviews with witnesses—waiters, hotel clerks, other yachtsmen, and, most notably, Christopher Walken, whose police interrogation is the only detailed account we have from him—tend to back up Davern’s story that Natalie Wood’s fatal fall was not simply an accident, as Robert Wagner has maintained, but the final act in a two-day drama of jealousy and rage, fueled by round-the-clock drinking.

It’s as if we always knew her, growing up in America, watching Natalie Wood live out her 43 years in darkened movie theaters across the country. Photoplay and Modern Screen were devoted to her in the 1950s: Wood in a boat-necked shirt, her hair freshly bobbed, feeding the porpoises at Marineland with Nick Adams, her co-star in Rebel Without a Cause; Wood being playfully spanked by handsome, blond Tab Hunter, whom Warner Bros. tried with little success to team romantically with her in The Burning Hills and The Girl He Left Behind.

Her youthful marriage to Robert Wagner, then a promising contract player, was catnip to the fan magazines. The envied couple were often seen nestled in an outsize red banquette at Jean Leon’s La Scala in Beverly Hills. Tom Wolfe described Wood’s “great big marvelous huge mothering brown eyes,” but she was really an American girl, struggling to grow up in film after film, from the doubting child who comes to believe in Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street to the rebellious teenager in Rebel Without a Cause to the yearning high-school girl destined for madness in Splendor in the Grass.

“She was right there at the apotheosis of the 50s,” a friend of Wood’s once said. After all, she hung out with both James Dean and Elvis Presley. (The two days she spent with the latter in November 1956 in Memphis were a big disappointment. “He can sing,” she later confided to her younger sister, Lana , now 54 years old and the head of Lana Wood Casting in Hollywood, “but he can’t do much else.”) She had been a child star for 13 years when, in the summer of 1956, she had her first date with Robert Wagner, known as “R.J.” to his friends. She was 18, he was 26. She was the sought-after veteran of 25 films and had just made the rare successful transition to adult actress; he was an aspiring actor at Twentieth Century Fox, the son of a well-to-do steel executive. He had grown up in a house overlooking the Bel-Air Country Cub, where he caddied for such stars as Clark Gable and Fred Astaire. His first real break came in 1952 when studio head Darryl F. Zanuck gave him a small role as a shell-shocked soldier in Walter Lang’s With a Song in My Heart. Susan Hayward, playing real-life music-hall entertainer Jane Froman, sings to Wagner’s tremulous soldier while tears run down his face. Thousands of fan letters poured in, auguring bigger roles to come. Two years later, however, he was stuck playing Prince Valiant in a pageboy wig and a padded body stocking complete with rubber calves. The $3 million CinemaScope epic did all right at the box office, but it was lethal to a budding career as a serious actor. Wagner later recalled wincingly that the Method-trained actors at the studio used to drop by the set to laugh at his ridiculous getup, and Dean Martin mistook him for Jane Wyman because of his wig.

At the same time, Wood was becoming a different kind of star. In 1955 she had played Judy in Rebel Without a Cause, which established her as a teen idol and won her an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress. (She lost to Jo Van Fleet in East of Eden .) While campaigning for the part, she was briefly hospitalized after a serious car accident with Dennis Hopper, then 18 years old and her co-star in the movie. When Wood was called a “juvenile delinquent” by the police, she was ecstatic and made sure Rebel’s 43-year-old director, Nicholas Ray—who had been skeptical because of her good-girl image—knew about it. It wasn’t long before the under-age actress fell into an affair with her director, meeting him secretly at the Chateau Marmont, just off Sunset Boulevard. Hopper remembered in Bernard Eisenschitz’s Nicholas Ray: An American Journey that he “got into terrible problems” with Ray, “because we were both fucking Natalie Wood. . . . Nick snitched on me. I was furious with him: the studio came down on me, and he came out of it as pure as snow.”

Wagner, on the other hand, cultivated older, established stars, such as Spencer Tracy, who became a mentor after the two worked together in Broken Lance (1954) and The Mountain (1956). Even though “Natalie was running around with people R.J. wouldn’t have in his house,” as a friend remembers, a romance ignited and became one of the most publicized in the history of Hollywood. Wagner shared his love of boats with Wood. In fact, the two consummated their relationship during a moonlit sail on Wagner’s boat My Lady —and, according to Lana Wood, continued to celebrate the anniversary every year.

They were married on December 28, 1957, in Scottsdale, Arizona. Los Angeles Times columnist Joyce Haber later described them as being “the most photographed, talked-about, envied couple since Wally Simpson and Edward VIII.” Many speculated that the marriage would boost Wagner’s career.

The couple spent much of their honeymoon on the water, first cruising the Florida Keys, where they met with a potential disaster at sea. Writing in Modern Screen in April 1958, gossip columnist Louella Parsons reported that

Mrs. Wagner got on the long distance phone to tell me, “We’re just now catching our breath. You’ve never seen anything like the storm that hit Florida just as we arrived to board the boat we’d chartered for a cruise.” . . . It was Bob on the telephone now. “The worst storm to hit the Florida coast in fifteen years blows up! . . . You’ll never believe what was happening to that boat as we tried to make our way back to port. It was pitching like a wild horse. Dishes and glasses were crashing all over the galley. . . . It was all but impossible for our skipper to see one wave ahead of us. I was so worried about Nat. It was an awful ordeal for her.”

After returning to Los Angeles, the newlyweds dropped anchor just off Catalina aboard My Lady. The small island, with its rich Hollywood history, would become a favorite escape. “I love being on the water and near the water,” Natalie would later say, “but not in the water.”

“Hollywood prepares you for life in front of the camera,” Lana Wood once observed, “but it doesn’t prepare you for private life.”

The writer Thomas Thompson, a close friend of Natalie’s who first met her when he was assigned to interview her for Life magazine, recalled that at the beginning of the marriage “Natalie was in emotional ruins.” She was insecure and suspicious of everyone, even of Wagner. Controlled by the studios and her ambitious Russian émigré stage mother, Maria Gurdin, who had pushed her into movies when she was only five, Wood suddenly realized that she had no idea who she was—she had spent her life taking on the roles of other people. “I was unable to make a decision of any kind. People had told me what to do all my life,” she later said.

Wood had terrible insomnia, lying awake at night trying to figure out why she was so unhappy. She began to rely on sleeping pills and finally told Wagner that she wanted to consult a psychiatrist. “For eight years she spent lunch hours every day—every day!—with her analyst, and she turned down important film roles because they would take her away from the couch,” Thompson observed.

Important roles nevertheless continued to come her way. Even the box-office disappointments of her two 1958 films, the hotly anticipated Marjorie Morningstar, based on the Herman Wouk best-seller, and Frank Sinatra’s Kings Go Forth, didn’t knock her off the A-list. Wagner, however, continued to have career troubles. Seven years earlier, he had been spoken of in the same breath with Tony Curtis and Rock Hudson, but Twentieth Century Fox was putting the boyishly handsome actor in such clinkers as Sail a Crooked Ship and Say One for Me.

“Here was Natalie, starring in a major movie like Splendor in the Grass, and here was R.J. doing dogs like Stopover Tokyo, ” one film director recalled. Wood attempted to resuscitate her husband’s career by appearing with him in the 1960 film All the Fine Young Cannibals —an overripe Tennessee Williams knockoff. “I was white trash, looking for money” is how Wood described her role in the film. “Bob was a trumpet player living with a black woman who was a singer. We all wore wigs.” The movie was an embarrassing flop. Wagner wouldn’t appear on-screen again for nearly two years, while Wood began filming one of her most important movies, William Inge’s Splendor in the Grass, opposite Warren Beatty .

With this movie Wood’s and Wagner’s real troubles began. “I do not know which came first,” Lana Wood said, “the end of her marriage or Warren Beatty.”

Splendor in the Grass, set in Kansas in the 1920s, was directed by the celebrated stage director Elia Kazan. Wood breaks your heart in the role of Deanie Loomis, who’s nearly destroyed in the struggle between her love for her high-school sweetheart, Bud, played with immense appeal by Beatty, and the puritanical tyranny of small-town America, embodied by her interfering mother, played by Audrey Christie. Under Kazan’s brilliant direction, Wood has an on-screen breakdown that is almost too painful to watch: Deanie, clad in a red dress, tries to drown herself in a reservoir. (For her work in the film, Wood would win her second Academy Award nomination.)

Beatty was making his film debut in the movie; he had been championed for the part by Inge, who had become enamored of the handsome actor during the 1959 Broadway run of his play A Loss of Roses, in which Beatty had played the lead. At first, Beatty and Wood did not get along, and there was concern that their love scenes were not generating sparks. Beatty was living with Joan Collins at the time, but at some point during filming, the passionate kissing on-camera began to catch fire. Kazan believed, as he later wrote, that “it was clear to Natalie . . . that Warren was bound for the top; this perception was an aphrodisiac.” One day Wagner arrived on the set and found Beatty’s arm wrapped around Wood’s waist while they were waiting for the lights to be set up. Beatty accused Wagner of keeping tabs on them. Wagner reacted with embarrassment and barely controlled rage. Kazan noticed the storm brewing, but he felt that if the budding affair between his two young actors helped their love scenes, he didn’t mind. The director regretted only the obvious pain the affair was causing Wagner. What made it even worse, according to Kazan’s autobiography, Elia Kazan: A Life, was that Wagner’s “sexual humiliation was public.”

Wagner finally walked out and went to stay on his boat at Newport Beach. His and Wood’s separation and subsequent divorce in 1963 shocked Hollywood. Elizabeth Taylor was said to have become so upset that she had to take to her bed. “Why does she need sedating?” asked Wood, who had a famously competitive relationship with Taylor. “It’s my marriage that just collapsed.”

To many observers, Wagner suffered the most. His career continued to decline, while Wood’s flourished. “It just didn’t seem fair,” wrote a friend of Wagner’s. “It must be admitted, he was probably jealous of her continued success. Natalie, however, had an enormous, single-minded ambition, and nothing was going to stop her.”

While her marriage was crumbling, Wood made some of the best films of her career— West Side Story in 1961 and Gypsy in 1962. To help prepare her for the role of the brainy burlesque queen Gypsy Rose Lee, Beatty took her to a strip club to watch two featured strippers: Fran Sinatra and Natalie Should. He also showed up on the set of Gypsy nearly every day.

The sea would play a dangerous and fateful role throughout Wood’s life. While filming Splendor in the Grass, the actress’s fear of the water came to Kazan’s attention. A few days before shooting the reservoir scene, Wood confided to the director that she had a deep-seated “terror of water, particularly dark water, and of being helpless in it.” Kazan, schooled in Stanislavskian method, remembered thinking how perfect that was for the scene. Wood asked him if it couldn’t be shot in a small studio tank, but the director refused. He explained that the reservoir was shallow and her feet would always touch bottom. She wasn’t reassured, but she did the scene and did it well. But back on dry land, Kazan remembered, Wood shivered with fear and then laughed hysterically with relief.

It was not the first time that Wood’s phobia had become an issue. When she was 11, in 1949, on the set of RKO’s The Green Promise, she was supposed to cross a bridge that was rigged to collapse once she reached the other side; however, somebody pulled the lever when she was halfway across, and she fell into the water below. “I don’t even remember them fishing me out,” Wood later recalled.

An even more harrowing incident occurred while filming The Star with Bette Davis in 1952. Ironically, it happened off Catalina, on a freezing January morning. The director, Stuart Heisler, wanted Wood to leap over the railing of Sterling Hayden’s private yacht. “Just jump,” Heisler told her. “There will be men in rowboats to pick you up.” When she hit the water she panicked and began screaming. Davis threatened to quit if they made Wood do the scene again. When they reshot it with a double, the stand-in became entangled in the kelp and nearly drowned. “After all that,” Wood said later, “they cut the scene from the movie.”

Four years after making Splendor in the Grass, Wood had yet another heart-stopping moment at sea, while filming a scene with Robert Redford in Santa Monica Bay for Robert Mulligan’s Inside Daisy Clover. A giant rogue wave suddenly reared up, separating a small boat containing Wood and Redford from the crew and technicians. Mulligan recalled that “there was no way we could get Natalie and Bob off the boat, and the lines to keep them in place were breaking right and left.” Redford thought the whole thing was a lark, but Wood was terrified.

With their careers going in opposite directions, who would ever have predicted that Wood and Wagner would be reunited, as they were in 1972. In the nine years between their divorce and remarriage, Wagner moved to Europe to try to change the course of his nearly moribund career. He had better luck there, landing an important cameo in Darryl Zanuck’s 1962 World War II epic, The Longest Day, and showing an unexpected gift for light comedy in Blake Edwards’s 1964 movie The Pink Panther; he also married his second wife, Marion Marshall Donen, who had recently been divorced from the director Stanley Donen.

“I grew up at last,” Wagner has said of the period, during which his good friend Paul Newman offered him the role of a lifetime: that of a weak rich man’s son who turns out to be the villain in the 1966 film Harper. “That’s the part that made me. For the first time, I got some damn good reviews,” he recalled. The whole course of Wagner’s career would soon change again, however: he would make his mark not in film but on television.

“In the sixties,” Wagner later said about the film business, “everybody was an antihero. There weren’t many parts for a guy like me.” Then Lew Wasserman, the president of MCA, called Wagner into his office and pulled out a copy of TV Guide. “This is where you belong!” he said. When the opportunity came for Wagner to play the debonair ex-con in the new ABC television series It Takes a Thief, he was ready. Premiering in 1968, the show became a hit, earning Wagner $10,000 per episode and giving him the role—that of “a small-screen version of Cary Grant”—for which he was perfectly suited.

Lana Wood noticed that her sister reacted with dismay when she learned of Wagner’s marriage to Donen; she was inconsolable when she heard that the couple was expecting a child. Wagner showed up at La Scala passing out cigars to celebrate the birth of his daughter Katharine in 1964; Natalie happened to be there that night, sitting in “their“ booth. When he passed by Wood’s table, “they looked at each other across years of melancholy,” Thomas Thompson later wrote.

After Beatty reportedly picked up the hatcheck girl at Chasen’s and left Wood alone and humiliated at the table (Suzanne Finstad, who says she has spoken to almost 400 people for her upcoming biography of Wood, calls this incident “unsubstantiated, recycled gossip”), Wood embarked on a string of paramours: Arthur Loew Jr. (heir to the theater chain); David Niven Jr.; the English actor Tom Courtenay; and Ladislav Blatnik, a Yugoslav playboy shoe magnate who, as a parlor trick, would eat Wood’s Baccarat crystal glasses. She was miserable. One afternoon in late 1966, just after Beatty stopped by, she swallowed a handful of sleeping pills. Fortunately she was found by her friend and secretary, Mart Crowley, later a playwright and the author of The Boys in the Band. Crowley saved her life by rushing her to Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Hollywood. “All I know is this,” Crowley later said. “Warren came by and they were talking. Then I heard raised voices and Warren left. Natalie went upstairs to her bedroom. That’s when she took the pills.”

But it wasn’t just Beatty or his ill-timed visit; it was an accumulation of sorrows. A journalist who had befriended Wagner had predicted that “Natalie Wood will end up the real loser.”

Then Richard Gregson, a charming English agent and producer, rescued her from all that. Their 1969 Russian Orthodox wedding was spectacular, held at the Holy Virgin Mary Cathedral in Los Angeles; Wood’s silk wedding dress had been designed by Edith Head. Her good friend Robert Redford was best man. However, the marriage was short-lived; the couple separated just months after the September 29, 1970, birth of their child, a girl they named Natasha (Natalie’s Russian name). She threw Gregson out of the house when she reportedly learned he was having an affair.

A few months earlier, Wagner and Marion Donen had filed for divorce. As work took him away from his family for longer periods, the marriage had deteriorated. Wagner briefly dated Tina Sinatra, even becoming engaged to her and hanging out at the Sinatra compound in Palm Springs. But once Wood had put Gregson out of her life, Wagner came calling. “Things happened fast,” Lana Wood observed. “They fell as hard, if not harder, than they had the first time. They were thrilled and confused.”

They chose the 1972 Academy Awards ceremony at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to re-emerge in public as a couple. As they stepped out of a limousine, their appearance caused pandemonium. Lana Wood recalled: “It was a reunion the whole world felt sentimental about.”

In spring 1972, Wood accompanied Wagner to London aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2 on a junket to promote a new television film he’d made with Bette Davis, Madame Sin. But the morning after the couple left New York Harbor for Southampton, a freak storm with 70-foot swells rose up and engulfed the ocean liner for four days. According to Warren G. Harris, author of Natalie and R.J., Wood and Wagner hid out in their cabin, fatalistically drinking champagne and eating caviar. When they emerged unharmed on the other side of the Atlantic, they decided to remarry.

They were married for the second time aboard Ramblin’ Rose, a borrowed yacht, on July 16, 1972. The yacht cruised along the California coast and stopped near Malibu at Paradise Cove. After letting the guests off the boat, the newlyweds made their blissful way to Catalina for their second honeymoon.

The history of Catalina is entwined with the history of Hollywood. Clark Gable filmed Mutiny on the Bounty in those island waters; Errol Flynn swashbuckled as Captain Blood off the Catalina coast. The pretty tourist town of Avalon, a one-square-mile village named for the mythical isle where King Arthur’s body was taken after his death, inspired the 1920 song “Avalon,” one of Al Jolson’s big hits. A film crew once imported a small herd of buffalo for a 1924 movie; their progeny—400 strong—still roam the remote, craggy hills high above the blue waters of the Pacific. Since the 1920s, Hollywood stars including Jean Harlow, John Barrymore, Douglas Fairbanks, Humphrey Bogart, and John Wayne have moored their yachts in Avalon’s sparkling harbor.

Throughout their second marriage, Wood and Wagner spent many weekends enjoying the pleasures of Catalina. “Our life started again—really beautifully—on that boat,” Wagner told a longtime friend. The waters of Catalina were not supposed to be the scene of a tragedy.

It is considered bad luck to change the name of a boat, but when Wagner and Wood bought Challenger in 1975, they nevertheless rechristened it Splendour, after a line in Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality.” Wood loved the poem, which, as Deanie, she had movingly read in Splendor in the Grass, but she always insisted the name wasn’t a reference to Kazan’s film, from which she wanted to distance herself because of the infidelity and jealousy that had erupted on the set. Those passions were safely in the past—or were they?

The couple hired the young man who had helped bring the boat from Florida to California to serve as their captain. Dennis Davern had been around boats since he was six years old. His first vessel was a rowboat his parents had bought him when his family lived in Margate City, New Jersey, a suburb of Atlantic City. Davern is still lean, lanky, and agile, though his long hair and beard have darkened. He says he has always loved the sense of freedom the sea gives him. “I was always the black sheep,” he says. “Everyone else stayed in New Jersey. I was the one to go.”

Davern remembers that “ Splendour was a big boat, with four staterooms and a full deck, and handrails all the way around. Even if you don’t like boats,” he says, “it would be like going on a cruise ship. You’d feel safe. . . . R.J. only paid 125 grand for it because it wasn’t a powerful boat. The original 16-cylinder diesel engine had been replaced with a pair of 8-cylinder diesels, not worth a whole lot, but Natalie wouldn’t have cared that the boat was underpowered. She was happy to go along at 10 miles an hour when you’re supposed to be going 30. If you went fast in the boat with her in it, you’d be pushing your luck.”

Wagner and Wood often included their skipper in festivities aboard Splendour. “With a lot of boat owners, you just try to stay out of the way. But as the years went by, we really got to know each other. We’d barbecue on the boat, and R.J. was the one who liked to put on the steaks, and Natalie would make the salad.”

Davern loved working for the Wagners, and was impressed that they brought their children on board for outings almost every other weekend. By 1974 the Wagners’ brood had grown to three: Katie, aged 10, from R.J.’s marriage to Marion; Natasha, Natalie’s 4-year-old daughter with Gregson; and Courtney, R.J. and Natalie’s daughter, born on March 9, 1974. The couple finally seemed to have all the happiness that had eluded them the first time around. “I’m glad we divorced,” Wood once told Thomas Thompson. “The intermission is what did it for us.” Wood was fond of quoting Mickey Ziffren (the wife of the Wagners’ lawyer Paul Ziffren), who had characterized the couple’s nearly 10-year separation as Seiten-sprung, the German word for switching partners while you’re dancing.

Wood and Wagner had switched not just partners but places as well. Wagner was at the apex of his career, portraying the suave Jonathan Hart in Hart to Hart, while Wood wasn’t working much. “[Natalie] had a past,” Lana Wood observed, “but [R.J.] had the present.” And if Wagner’s fame as a television star was a few notches below his wife’s status as a film icon, so be it: television had made Wagner rich. Besides income from his own successful shows, the Wagners’ production company would end up with almost half of the profits from the hit series Charlie’s Angels, as part of a deal he had forged with Aaron Spelling.

If television had rescued Wagner’s flagging career, he reasoned, it might do the same for his wife’s, so he started easing her into television, beginning with The Affair, in 1973, made when Natalie was pregnant with Courtney. Another television project that delighted her was playing Maggie the Cat opposite Wagner’s Brick in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, with Laurence Olivier as Big Daddy.

“When she had things to do,” Davern recalls, “she was excited. She’d get a lot of movie scripts, but nothing would ever come of them.”

By 1981, Wood had become a spokeswoman for RainTree’s line of beauty products (“Keep your age a secret with RainTree”). Her film career had been in trouble for a long time. After This Property Is Condemned in 1966, there would be only six more films, and a cameo in Robert Redford’s The Candidate in 1972. Her role in 1969’s hit Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice was seen as something of a comeback, but then followed such flops as the private-eye spoof Peeper, with Michael Caine, in 1975, and the disaster movie Meteor, with Sean Connery and Henry Fonda, in 1979.

Part of the problem was that Natalie was “Old Hollywood even though she wasn’t old,” Lana Wood said. She was a product of the studio system who came into her maturity when that system was going out of style.

It wasn’t just Wood’s and Wagner’s careers that underwent a reversal of fortune; their private lives followed suit. There was much speculation about the on-camera heat being generated between Wagner and the striking, brunette 39-year-old Stefanie Powers. Although Wood knew that Powers had, for a long time, been William Holden’s girlfriend, she was jealous. One day she appeared with Natasha and Courtney on the set of Hart to Hart while Wagner and Powers were filming a love scene. The two girls began to cry, and Wood comforted them by saying, “This is just the way Daddy makes a living.”

These were some of the pressures the couple took with them on weekend outings to Catalina. Davern recalls how he’d often “knock down a few bottles of wine with [Natalie and R.J.] Natalie was the real partyer. I’d tell her, ‘I’ll give you five quaaludes if you give me 10 Valiums,’ because at that time I liked taking a Valium in the morning and floating all day long. . . . So it would be, ‘Let’s eat these quaaludes, let’s chase them down with some wine.’ They had total trust in me, so they could do anything they wanted.”

The captain of Splendour was well aware of Wood’s fear of the water. “We could sit in Catalina, on the mooring cable, and R.J. and the kids would be swimming off the back of the boat, and me and Natalie would be on the bridge. . . . We were each other’s therapists sometimes. I remember her sitting there saying, ‘I think my biggest fear would be to drown.’ . . . I remember it was a sunny day when she said that.”

But it wasn’t a sunny day when Wood invited Christopher Walken to join her and Wagner on Splendour over the 1981 Thanksgiving weekend. It was gray and cold, and the sea was rough.

Walken, who had won an Academy Award for best supporting actor in Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter two years earlier, was co-starring with Wood in Brainstorm, a science-fiction thriller, which also featured Louise Fletcher, who had won the best-actress Oscar in 1976 for One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Cliff Robertson, who had won best actor in 1969 for Charly.

According to Davern, Wood became infatuated with Walken during the filming and openly flirted with him. “When they were in North Carolina together, rumors were going around about Chris Walken and Natalie, so R.J. went down there,” Davern explains. “He had a few days off from Hart to Hart . . . but he wasn’t about to make a fool of himself over this.” Lana Wood also believed her sister had an infatuation with Walken. In her 1984 book, Natalie, Lana wrote, “I don’t know if Natalie’s [love affair] with Chris was imaginary or real, though my strong suspicion is that it was all in her mind and that perhaps she was only wishing it to be so.” At least it seems that no romantic intrigue occurred on the set of Brainstorm, because Walken’s wife, Georgianne, had been present for the duration of the shoot.

Then, out of the blue, Davern got word that Walken was coming on the boat for a weekend cruise to Catalina. “I don’t think R.J. knew Christopher,” Davern says. “He was more the young movie star, where R.J. had been around for years.” It was a volatile situation, which may have been why Wood also invited Mart Crowley, who had been made a producer on Hart to Hart, and Peggy Griffin, her secretary. Both begged off, pleading too much work.

Davern didn’t like Walken from the moment he appeared on the dock at Marina del Rey. The weather was miserable. “The heaters were on in the boat. We were only doing it because of Christopher . . . who comes on board wearing a navy pea coat with the collar up. I don’t know this guy from Adam, and I guess I felt the way R.J. felt.”

They left around noon on Friday. Davern says he noticed that Wagner seemed put out by all the attention Wood was lavishing on their guest. “Christopher and Natalie are sitting in the salon together and giggling, and I’m looking at R.J. and thinking, He doesn’t look too happy. R.J. was getting annoyed, and plus, we’re drinking. . . . I was seeing R.J. getting mad. The boat just starts getting smaller. You can’t look for a whole lot of escape.”

Shortly after they left port, however, Walken got seasick and spent most of the rest of the crossing sleeping in his stateroom. When he emerged, the yacht was already in the harbor at Avalon. Since there were no moorings available, they had to anchor a quarter-mile off Avalon’s Casino Ballroom, built in 1929 by William Wrigley, the chewing-gum tycoon. Around five P.M., Wagner, Wood, and Walken went into town, while Davern stayed aboard to make dinner.

The trio shopped at a number of boutiques and then headed for El Galleon, a restaurant facing the harbor. They had a few beers and discussed how to get one of Avalon’s jewelers to lower his prices. Darkness was falling when they reboarded Splendour, where Davern was preparing a barbecue. Walken, still feeling ill, decided to skip dinner and returned to his stateroom to lie down.

Then, according to a December 10, 1981, interview Davern had with police (in the presence of two attorneys, Stephen Miller and Mark Beck, whom Wagner had hired), since it was “‘a grumpy sea’ . . . R.J. wanted to move the position of the boat, and Natalie said it wouldn’t do any good . . . [so] she said she would rather spend the night ashore.”

Wagner’s interview with police, on December 4, 1981, largely agreed with this story: “The sea was pretty rough. He [Wagner] recalled he did move the Splendour closer to shore to get out of the heavy sea. There had been some disagreement as to this move by Natalie and he told her to take Dennis [Davern], the captain, ashore and stay in a hotel for the night.”

Today, however, Davern tells a different story about what happened: “There was some kind of argument going on. Christopher went down to take a nap or something, and Natalie and R.J. started fighting. I thought, I don’t believe this! I don’t believe this fight is still going on. This was later in the afternoon. Natalie says to R.J., ‘You’re being so silly.’ It went back and forth and back and forth. Natalie finally says to R.J., ‘I’m going ashore,’ and she asks me, ‘Dennis, will you take me ashore?’” Wood wanted to leave, Davern says, because “the tension on the boat was unbearable.” She had had enough and wanted to go home. Concerned that the fighting was getting out of hand, Davern says, he knocked on Walken’s stateroom door and asked him to intervene. Walken refused, cautioning him, “Never get involved in an argument between a man and a wife.”

Walken’s main interview with police, which took place on December 3, 1981, in the actor’s room (No. 601) at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, corroborates Davern’s new version that an argument occurred between Wood and Wagner: “Being very ill he [Walken] returned to his bunk. He stated he felt he was aware of some kind of hubbub up above. There was no yelling. Approximately 20 minutes later he thought he heard the sound of an anchor chain. He then recalled Natalie coming to the door of his cabin and telling him, ‘He wants to cross during the night.’ He then recalled she left. He next remembered the captain contacting him and wanting him to come up to get involved. He stated he told the captain, ‘Never get involved in an argument between a man and a wife.’”

Davern took Wood ashore in Valiant (which Wagner had jokingly named after what he considered his worst film) and the two headed for El Galleon. There, according to Paul Reynolds, the manager of the restaurant, in his police interview of November 29, 1981, they “requested to use the telephone to see if they could locate rooms for the night. He [Reynolds] stated he asked the victim if she had a boat and she replied ‘no, is there a boat going back.’ He advised her that the next boat returning from the mainland would be at 10 a.m. the following morning. Mr. Reynolds then made a telephone call to the Pavilion Lodge [a nearby hotel in Avalon] and reserved two rooms for Ms. Wood. He further said Ms. Wood and this other man were sitting at the bar having a couple of drinks prior to leaving for the hotel.”

The Pavilion Lodge was not chosen for privacy—the rooms face an interior court off Avalon’s main street, right on the harbor—but it was one of the few hotels that had rooms available on such short notice. Ann Laughton, the night receptionist at the Pavilion Lodge, recalled for police in her November 29, 1981, interview that Wood and Davern arrived at 11:15 P.M. and registered for two rooms. “[Laughton] further recalled that during registration they had asked her for some ice and she had shone [ sic ] them how to get it from the ice machine. She further added that they both appeared very intoxicated.”

On November 29, 1981, in the first of his two interviews with police, at the sheriff’s station at Isthmus harbor, Davern told police that “all four of them spent the night on the boat.” The police, however, had prior knowledge that this wasn’t true. They confronted Davern with his lie, and the boat captain “stated before answering that he’d rather talk to ‘R.J.’ and possibly an attorney.” In his second interview, on December 10, in the presence of Wagner’s attorneys, Davern admitted he had spent the night with Wood, because, in the Dragnet prose of the police report, “whenever Ms. Wood, victim, went ashore, he was usually directed to go with her to act as her bodyguard.”

Davern now clarifies that he ended up staying in the room with Wood. “We just drank the wine and went to sleep,” he says. “We thought it was best for me to stay with her, for protection. She knew I wasn’t going to make any kind of play for her—she was comfortable with me.”

The police report confirms that Socorro Meza, an employee at the Pavilion Lodge, told investigators that Davern’s room “had the appearance of being unused.” Walken and Wagner spent the night on Splendour.

The next morning, according to Linda Winkler, a day clerk at the Pavilion Lodge, Wood “looked fine but seemed somewhat disoriented.” Winkler told police on November 30, 1981, that “during [their] conversation Ms. Wood had asked where she could catch boat transportation back to the mainland and [Winkler] had directed Ms. Wood to the proper location. Ms. Winkler further told investigators she’d been amazed at the fact that a movie star like Ms. Wood would be taking public transportation back to the mainland.”

Then Wood changed her mind. With middle age, she had become particularly self-conscious about her appearance. Though still beautiful, she had complained to Lana about the accumulating years: “I’m fighting every damn one.” Perhaps more important, she didn’t want to abandon Walken, who was still aboard Splendour, so she and Davern returned to the yacht.

Walken told police that “he was awakened the next morning by Natalie, and she made some remark about she was going to take the sea plane back and wanted to know if he was staying. He recalled making the statement to her, ‘I’m not in this.’”

So Wood went to work rustling up a big breakfast of huevos rancheros for everyone. “Everyone acted like nothing happened,” Davern recalls, “and everything was beautiful again.”

At around 11 A.M., R.J. took the boat up to Isthmus Cove, at the other end of the island. Out on the water, Walken told police, “Robert Wagner was trying to talk him into doing some fishing and setting up some fishing poles. He [Walken] recalled R.J. thanking him for smoothing everything over.”

After they arrived that afternoon in Isthmus Cove, Davern recalled, Wood sat in the main salon and read while he, Wagner, and Walken went to their staterooms to take naps. After Walken woke up, he and Wood went ashore in Valiant, settled into Doug’s Harbor Reef, and began drinking. Sometime later Wagner and Davern took the water taxi to shore and joined them.

Davern says now that when they arrived Walken and Wood “were out of it—giggling and laughing. Me and R.J. are pretty sober—we don’t drink around the clock.”

Michelle Mileski, a waitress at the restaurant, told police on November 29, 1981, that Wagner and Davern had preceded Walken and Wood at the bar. Then when Wagner made reservations for an early dinner, Wood had expressed dissatisfaction with the wine list, stating, “We could go shopping on the Splendour and get our own wine.” Davern remembers that he and Walken returned to Splendour for that purpose. Aboard Valiant, Davern says, he and Walken smoked a joint, so when they returned to the restaurant with some wine, he felt “right in tune with Christopher and Natalie—high as a kite.”

The party’s waitress, Tina Quinn, told police in a November 29, 1981, interview that “during this dinner party [the Wagner foursome] consumed the two bottles of wine and that [one of the men] had been drinking daiquiris, further she remembered that other parties in the bar had bought two bottles of champagne for the Wagner party. During the meal she said the victim did not eat much of her dinner and was doing a lot of the complaining about small things such as there was too much light on the table, the table was too big, the fish was not fresh, and it appeared to the witness that the victim was not in the best of moods. Ms. Quinn recalled an incident where she saw the victim throw a water glass to the floor. . . . As they were starting to leave she recalled Robert Wagner lifting a large dark colored jacket and she felt it was being used as a shield because the victim appeared to be stumbling slightly. She then recalled all of the Wagner party leaving together and it was her opinion they were not in the best of moods. She clarified this statement saying that throughout the evening the victim appeared to be in changing moods, sometimes laughing and sometimes solemn.”

Don Whiting, the restaurant manager, recalled for police, also on November 29, 1981, that “he thought at the time there was some possible problems between Robert Wagner and his wife, the victim. He remembered some glass was broken, possibly thrown. He was of the impression that Robert Wagner was a little bit irritated with his wife.”

Walken later explained away the broken-glass incident to police by saying, “It was my fault. I was making a toast while drinking. At the conclusion of this toast, I threw my glass to the floor as I always do. I remember Natalie, and I think everybody else, did the same.”

Whatever the reason, it wasn’t the first time Wood had broken a wineglass when angered or upset. According to Lana Wood, Natalie had crushed a crystal glass in her hand the day that Wagner had left the house after the demise of their first marriage. She re-created the gesture in the television drama The Affair in a scene in which Wagner’s character abandons her.

Davern recalls today that throughout dinner Wood “was definitely flirting with [Walken]. They were like all giggling and touching. She was excited by Christopher—here’s this good-looking guy.” Wood didn’t want to return to the boat after dinner, Davern says.

Both William Peterson, the shore-boat operator, and Kurt Craig, in the harbor-patrol office, told police that they watched the Wagner party board Valiant and motor back to their yacht. Craig later told police that as the four were descending the ramp to the dinghy “what he described as a scream [came] from the female. He thought she may have been drunk and was unhappy at something that happened at the restaurant.”

At his press conference Thomas Noguchi stated that, according to information he had obtained from police investigators, a “nonviolent argument” had occurred aboard the yacht just prior to Wood’s disappearance. This electrified the media.

To quell the ensuing rumors, Robert Wagner put out his version of the final hours. This is how it’s quoted in the 1986 hagiography Heart to Heart with Robert Wagner:

We reached the boat in a happy frame of mind after spending a few hours at the restaurant eating and drinking. During dinner, I got into a political debate with Walken and we continued it aboard the yacht. There was no fight, no anger. Just a lot of words thrown around like you hear in most political discussions such as “you don’t know what you are talking about!” Natalie sat there not saying much of anything and looking bored. She left us after about a half hour, and we sat there talking for almost another hour. Then I went to kiss her good night, and found her missing.

Wagner goes on to theorize about how Wood had gotten into the water:

It was only after I was told that she was dressed in a sleeping gown, heavy socks, and a parka that it dawned on me what had really occurred. Natalie obviously had trouble sleeping with that dinghy slamming up against the boat. It happened many, many times before, and I had always gone out and pulled the ropes tighter to keep the dinghy flush against the yacht. She probably skidded on one of the steps after untying the ropes. The steps are slick as ice because of the algae and seaweed that’s always clinging to them. After slipping on the steps, she hit her head against the boat. . . . I only hope she was unconscious when she hit the water.

Wagner’s two interviews with police were even less detailed. In the first, at 9:54 on the morning of the tragedy, he stated simply that “they were in the Salon when victim [Wood] went below to her bedroom. Shortly after they noticed she and the [ Valiant ] were missing.” Since Wagner “was in an emotional state,” the interview was terminated almost immediately. In the somewhat more detailed. December 4 interview, Wagner related only that “after they were aboard awhile, Natalie went down to bed and at this point in time, he recalled Chris Walken stepping out on deck for awhile. When Chris returned inside the salon, they continued talking. He estimated approximately 15 minutes passed. When he went to check on Natalie he noticed she was gone.”

When the police pressed Wagner “as to the discussion they had had prior to her going to bed,” he told them “it was about her being away from home and the kids so much. . . . He missed her being around.”

When questioned about the broken glass which police investigators had found in the main salon of Splendour in their search of the boat that began at 12:45 P.M. the day of the tragedy, Wagner explained that “it was probably from the rough seas.”

Davern, in his December 10 police interview, was a bit more forthcoming, but not much: “He recalled that RJ and Natalie got into a discussion about her being gone and how RJ missed her. During the discussion Chris Walken entered into it, supporting Natalie’s views. He felt RJ was getting upset over this and Chris Walken getting up and going outside around this time. Natalie went to the master stateroom to go to bed. Chris Walken came back into the main salon and he was going to bed. Here this was normal procedure for Natalie. In the evening she would just leave, prepare herself for bed, and usually return after ten or fifteen minutes to say goodnight. . . After some time past [ sic ], he stated, RJ went to see where Natalie was. When they noticed she was gone, about the same time they noticed the [ Valiant ] was gone.”

Today, however, Davern tells a different and darker story: Back on board, he says, he offered to make tea for everyone. “While the tea is brewing, the wine is flowing. We opened another bottle [probably Wood’s favorite, Pouilly-Fuissé]. Then Natalie lit her beeswax candles. R.J. was drinking scotch by then, and I joined him. So we’re sitting there, and Chris and Natalie are giggling and carrying on, the same as before, totally forgetting that me and R.J. are there. I’m saying to myself, Oh my God, this is getting to be too much right now.

“All of a sudden,” Davern says, “R.J. grabbed a bottle of wine and smashes it right on the table in front of them. Glass goes flying all over.

“‘Jesus Christ,’ R.J. says to Christopher, ‘what are you trying to do, fuck my wife?’

“Christopher got up in two or three seconds and headed right out the door. Now Natalie says, ‘I’m not standing for this a minute longer!’ She goes down to her stateroom and slams her door. Christopher goes right down to his stateroom. Now I’m left alone with R.J.

“I say, ‘R.J., let’s just calm down.’ We stayed up there for a little while, then R.J. says, ‘I’m going to go down there and see Natalie.’”

Davern says that as he remained on the bridge, located right over the Wagners’ stateroom, he could hear the couple “fighting like crazy. . . . I’d never in a million years seen them fight like that before. I just couldn’t believe it. . . . You know, stuff getting thrown around.” It was, according to Davern, a ferocious argument fueled by drink—“so hot and heavy that it got carried out into the cockpit” at the rear of the yacht. Davern says he next heard “the dinghy being untied—you can hear the ropes, the bowline being tugged on.”

And then, Davern says, there was silence. It seemed like a long time to him before Wagner, “tousled, sweating profusely, as if he had been in a terrible fight, an ordeal of some kind,” came back up to the bridge, where the two men emptied another bottle of wine.

Davern says that it was about 11:30 when Wagner returned. “We were up there drinking until 1:30 in the morning. Then R.J. said, ‘I’d better go back down and check on Natalie.’”

After a few minutes, Wagner appeared and told the captain, “She’s gone.”

“She’s gone? Where the hell is she?”

“I don’t know.”

Davern decided to go look for her. “I thought maybe she went into my stateroom, feeling she could confide in me. So I went up and she’s not there. So I looked in the empty stateroom—nothing. I look in Christopher’s stateroom. He’s in the top bunk and he’s asleep. I looked in his bathroom, and thank God she’s not in Christopher’s room. I knew that wouldn’t happen, because there’s too much rage going on. So I go back up and say, ‘She’s not down below.’”

Davern walked out on deck to look for her, and that’s when he noticed that Valiant was gone.

Davern was baffled. He believes that if Wood had decided to return to shore at night he would certainly have been asked to go with her. “If the stars aren’t out, it’s total darkness. There’s no place to go. Darkness all around. I wouldn’t go out on [ Valiant ] at night.”

Davern says he then told Wagner that he was going to turn on Splendour’s floodlights in order to look for her, but Wagner told him not to: “Dennis, don’t turn that on.” Davern then offered to fire up the yacht’s engines and cruise around looking for Wood. According to Davern, Wagner refused.

“Don’t do that. Let’s think about this. We don’t want to do anything, Dennis, because we don’t want to alert all these people,” Davern says Wagner told him.

With the police report, we at last have Christopher Walken’s description of the crucial hours preceding the tragedy. It is a story closer to Davern’s than to Wagner’s. In the first of his two interviews, at 10 on the morning of the tragedy, he told police, “After they were aboard the boat he and Robert Wagner got into a small beef. He left the cabin and went outside on deck for a few minutes, when he returned victim [Wood] was sitting there and she seemed to be disturbed. He recalled she then went to her room and he thought she had gone to bed. He next remembered the captain dennis make [ sic ] a remark ‘the dinghy is gone.’”

Walken’s more detailed, December 3 interview produced this version:

They were in the salon talking; he [Walken] stated they had all been drinking and they had one of those conversation [ sic ] going were [ sic ]—and he used the reference—“you put all your cards on the table.” RJ was making statements and complaining that she was away from home too much. She was away from the kids, it was hurting their home life. Mr. Walken stated he also got involved with discussion supporting the victim’s views—she was an actress, she was an important person, this was her life. He suddenly realized he was violating his own view about getting involved in an argument between a man and a wife. He stepped outside for some air and when he returned, everybody was apologizing, particularly Robert Wagner and everything seemed fine.

Duane Rasure is a big man—six feet three—who dresses like a cowboy now that he’s in retirement from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, Homicide Bureau. He and his wife, Joy, live in a remote town in Arizona called Eagar. Rasure still wears a belt buckle that proudly displays the number 187, the number of the section of California’s penal code for murder. When he got the call to investigate the Wood drowning, he had been a homicide detective for 11 years. He and his partner had helped break the case of the Hillside Strangler in the late 70s.

“They called me about 8:30 in the morning. They told me I got the case of Natalie Wood drowning in Catalina, which surprised me. The news threw my wife into shock, and from then on it was a matter of getting dressed, heading for the heliport, where I was transported to Catalina to do my investigation.”

Twenty minutes after Rasure’s arrival, a helicopter brought Wagner and Walken to the sheriff’s office on the island. “I introduced myself and my partner [Roy Hamilton] to Wagner, and told him what we were going to do. I could see he’s at a loss. He’s just in trouble. He’s hurting. It took just a short time to get a general idea of what had happened. It seemed accidental from the first, probably because of the way I got the information—the way it was presented: ‘Someone fell overboard and drowned.’ Nothing in the world would make us think at the time that there might have been something suspicious.”

Rasure would soon feel the pressure of the investigation. He started getting calls from old friends who knew he’d been assigned to the case. Quite a few tough homicide detectives were touched by Wood’s death. “They would call me up,” Rasure recalls, “and say, ‘Duane, tell me what happened. I loved that girl. I watched her grow up.’”

A week after the drowning, at one in the afternoon on December 4, Rasure visited Wagner’s home in Beverly Hills in order to question the actor a second time. “The first time I interviewed him he was just as cooperative as could be,” Rasure recalls. “But I didn’t get enough information at the heliport. So I went to interview him again, and his attorney says, ‘I don’t think so. I think you have enough.’

“At that time, we had a sheriff who was a very powerful man here,” Rasure explains. “We went to lunch, and I told him I was having this little handicap, this little problem with this attorney, and he says, ‘Oh.’ I had my appointment [with R.J.] the following day.”

Rasure arrived and was taken upstairs. Wagner was in bed during the entire interview, with his lawyer Paul Ziffren in the room. “I let him tell me what happened, going into more detail.” Once again, Rasure was satisfied. Roy Hamilton would tell the Los Angeles Times that “we talked to Wagner and Walken and there was no indication that there was any argument.” (This is rather astonishing, considering the police interviews with Walken.)

Despite the fact that there were obvious inconsistencies in the testimony of the three principal witnesses, the police investigation was closed on December 11, less than two weeks after the tragedy, with the conclusion of “accidental drowning.” Rasure, who subscribes to the theory that Wood slipped while trying to retie the dinghy, says, however, that he doesn’t really know for sure what happened to the actress.

“I can’t tell you exactly how she got in the water,” he says today.

As a witness, Dennis Davern presents many problems. The first is why he didn’t initially tell police the version he tells today, rather than letting it out piecemeal to journalists and tabloids over the almost 20 years that followed.

Davern claims that in the days after the tragedy he became a virtual prisoner in Wagner’s Beverly Hills home: at first, he and R.J. would wake around 10 each morning and “cry on each other’s shoulders, with a scotch glass in one hand and an arm around each other.” After several weeks, however, it slowly dawned on Davern, he says, that it would be very difficult to leave. He had a girlfriend he wanted to visit, and he began to wonder when and how he could go see her. She had already come to the house and had been rebuffed, he alleges. “When the alarm system kicked in at night, you couldn’t even open your door. It was like being in a vault. The first night I was there, I wanted to go downstairs to watch television, but I couldn’t get out. . . . There was no phone in the room. I couldn’t walk out the front door—somebody was always there, usually R.J.’s bodyguard. I felt really closed in.”

“In the daytime,” Davern says, “I would go downstairs and the staff would say, ‘Let me make you some drinks, Dennis.’ I’d go to the bar, pour a scotch, and R.J. would be up in his bedroom. It was like this for three months.”

“When I look back on it,” Davern now says, “I was a pure idiot. I had turned into a real drunk. I felt that I was a part of R.J., that he was going to make sure that Dennis was O.K.”

Davern says that Wagner went as far as to bring him to his own psychotherapy sessions. “I was having dreams like crazy. I’d wake up with some weird dreams. And R.J. said, ‘Dennis, I’m having bad dreams, too.’ So R.J. and I would go to his shrink together. We would sit down, sometimes in the same session, sometimes alone.”

On December 2, 1981, Wood was buried in Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery while a balalaika played softly under the warm afternoon sun. Robert Wagner plucked gardenias from Natalie’s casket, handing one each to Wood’s mother, to her sisters, and to her daughters. Then he bent down and kissed the gold-trimmed white coffin.

After the funeral, Davern says, reporters began tailing him, trying to get his story by posing as potential boat buyers or by luring him with beautiful women. He claims one tabloid offered him $200,000. When Davern told Wagner about the offer, Davern recalls, he cautioned him, “Dennis, they’re never going to pay you.” He further warned Davern that the F.B.I. would be asking him questions, and Natalie’s fans would be after him. “So I was cut off from everybody. . . .They said they were protecting me.”

Wagner got Davern into the Screen Actors Guild, Davern says, and although Davern had never acted before in his life, he started getting small roles on commercials and on Hart to Hart. “He [Wagner] used to give me checks,” Davern recalls, “a thousand, two thousand. My friends said it was hush money and that R.J. wouldn’t want anything to do with me after Splendour was gone. I used to tell them that R.J. wasn’t like that, that he was a real friend to me.”

Davern eventually decided to get his yacht broker’s license and live on the boat while he tried to sell it for R.J. It was his way, he felt at the time, to escape finally from R.J.’s protective scrutiny. “I took the boat somewhere where nobody would know it. I had a friend up in Oxnard who had a house with a dock in the back. So I took the Splendour up there. But nobody wanted anything to do with this yacht. It had become a bastard boat.” Wagner ended up donating it to the Sea Scouts, a youth boating club.

Once Splendour and Wagner were out of his life, Davern made his way back to South Florida. In the intervening years, the former sea captain has resurfaced periodically to try to tell his version of what happened that night. He has not been his own best advocate, holding back information and implying that he knows more than he’s saying. He sold part of his story to the Globe (“World Exclusive, NATALIE WOOD, the Shocking Truth About Her Death”), revealing that an argument occurred with Walken in the salon, but not revealing the alleged details and severity of the subsequent argument between Wagner and Wood in their stateroom.

There was also a disastrous appearance on Geraldo Rivera’s Now It Can Be Told in 1992, 10 years after the drowning, in which Rasure and Davern were asked to give their account of what happened that night for a “jury” comprising Raoul Felder and two other trial lawyers. By now Davern was writing a book about his experiences, and he arrived at the television studio with his co-author, a longtime friend named Margaret “Marti” Rulli. But he found the interview hard going, and he interrupted it several times so he could confer with Rulli off-camera. Then Davern was prompted, “They were yelling and screaming at each other to get off the boat . . . ” He responded, “Oh God, I don’t know if I can tell them that or not.” Rulli, exasperated, replied, “Ten years of this, Dennis! This needs to be cleared up! We have to say how she got in the water, Den.” But Rulli changed her mind—or perhaps just realized how stubborn Davern could be—and she said, “Don’t you tell them how she got into the water. . . . We put that in the book and we’ll make billions from it.”

Without their knowledge, Davern and Rulli were being filmed in their unguarded moments “off-camera,” and that’s what was televised on Now It Can Be Told. Rivera then essentially dismissed Davern’s testimony as compromised, but asked his panel of lawyers to comment anyway. All three agreed: the important fact was that Davern modified his police testimony, which almost always warrants a new investigation. Their unanimous verdict: reopen the case.

After the taping, Wagner sent Davern a letter warning him not to discuss the matter further.

Davern and Rulli also pounded the sidewalks trying to sell their manuscript to New York publishers. Davern says, “We went up to this publishing house and they said, ‘Who’s your agent?’ They must have thought we were total jerks! Nothing ever came of it. But it’s a good thing it never worked out—I never even told Marti the whole story.”

One former book editor, who met with the two, remembers being “chilled and intrigued by their tale, but we didn’t see how they could stretch it out into a full-length book. Also, we wondered where was the backup for his story. It was basically his word against Wagner’s.”

In Coroner, Noguchi admitted he had trouble with Wagner’s theory that Wood was bothered by the noise of the dinghy striking the side of the boat and slipped into the water while trying to retie it. “I found that theory plausible,” wrote Noguchi, “particularly because it explained her nightgown-and-socks apparel. And yet there was a possible flaw. The dinghy was rubber, and, according to Paul Miller, our expert who owned a similar boat [which by another curious coincidence in the case was moored to the same buoy, in front of Splendour, the night Wood died], a rubber dinghy makes little or no noise when it strikes a yacht.” (But, Noguchi allowed, “silence is relative. . . . Other sailors say that the noise might be amplified to an annoying degree.”)

In addition, Noguchi wrote, “forensic evidence, such as the fingernail scratches on the side of the dinghy, the brush-type abrasion on her cheek, and the untouched algae on the swim step, seemed to indicate that she was trying to board the dinghy, not just adjust its rope, when the accident happened.”

In the end, Noguchi, like Rasure, is not really sure how and why Wood ended up in the water. Perhaps Noguchi knows more than he is telling, thanks to his unreleased “psychological autopsy.” In a brief phone interview, he claims the document could be found with both the police report and the autopsy report. Scott Carrier, the information officer at the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office, says, “I have no idea where that report would be. Everything that was in the Natalie Wood file was sent to you. We have no additional reports.”

Davern says he has stopped trying to make money off his tale. He claims he recently turned down a $50,000 offer from a tabloid, although he still hopes the book he began writing many years ago about his life with the Wagners might one day be published. “I think she deserves an explanation for her death,” he says. He still has dreams about being aboard Splendour. He’s married now and raising three young children on a quiet street in a small Florida town, where he paints and restores boats. He named his first child Natasha.

Photos: Natalie Wood Through the Years

Sam Kashner

Sam's Marine

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Splendour Yacht - Natalie Wood

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Thread: Splendour Yacht - Natalie Wood

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With all the recent news about Natalie Wood's death, there have been a few photos of the boat that Wagner owned. Intrigued by its lines I was wondering if anyone had any additional info about it. It appears to be named Splendour, and reportedly a 1960 58' Bristol Boat made by the Allen Quimby Veneer Company out of Bristol, Maine. The boat is currently owned by Ron Nelson and is docked at Ala Wai Yacht harbor in Honolulu. He bought the boat in 1986. The boat was previously called Grateful Lady and Nelson changed the name back to Splendour. He has been restoring her to her original and recreating the Natalie Woods theme on the boat. There are a few shots of the exterior and interior here. Interior: http://photos.tmz.com/galleries/insi...ab=most_recent Exterior: http://photos.tmz.com/galleries/nata...ab=most_recent Any other info on Bristol Boats?

Formally Top Hatt and Tails 1980 53MY

Re: Splendour Yacht - Natalie Wood

Hi All, A bunch more pictures on this site. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...=feeds-newsxml

Gene Former Owner 1974 Hatteras Yachtfish Glittering Image Hull # 50 Total Production 1972-1975 Sixty Four

Strange layout, that so called stateroom opens out to the aft cockpit? and the bed is a hideaway ?

Ok, now the story makes sense. I never could figure out how she got from her cabin to the dingy with the guys sitting in the saloon, which was the story in the press (of course the press doesn't realize how weird the layout of that boat is.... they probably think they're all built like that... But even the Yachtfisherman with the big aft cabin has no direct access to a dinghy, except through an escape hatch, which I knew Natalie would never have attempted. RJ should have bought a Hatteras!

Oooh, oooh. An opportunity to drag out old morbid jokes! Name two kinds of wood that don't float.... Petrified and ??????

--- The poster formerly known as Scrod --- I want to live in Theory, everything works there. 1970 36C375

We were moored next to them a number of times back in the day in a cove called Emerald Bay on Catalina Island off of the coast of California. She was very reclusive, but Bob Wagner was very personable and had two young daughters that he took out dinghy cruising often. He even invited our two kids who were the same age to play with the girls. Really a down to earth guy. She would wave from the boat but never interacted with others in the cove. Looking at the pictures of Splendour now, she never looked that good back then. I never could figure out, with all of their money, why they bought this boat. Anyway, this latest news item brought back some memories....Ross

A post for a new HOF member researching Quimby Boat Company and the Splendour. Please reply to John directly or via this thread (I still find it interesting): I am trying to get contact information for Ron Nelson.* I have quite a bit of historical information about the Bristol boats and would like to exchange information with him.* This boat was one of only two of this length built by the Quimby Company in the late 50's and early 60's. John Freed 651-464-5390 [email protected]

This is maybe a minor correction but the boat actually belonged to the Wood family, at least that's what I have discovered about this boat. I just may be wrong, RW could have bought this boat at any time. I suppose a search on the Title might tell the real truth but I'm pretty sure.... It's STILL for sale as of 3/9/18 for the ridiculously low price of $10,000....says the ghosts haunt the boat and that he had 3 Hawaiian Kahuna's bless the boat...IF you believe in that sort of thing...

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Natalie Wood's Fatal Voyage

The 1981 drowning of natalie wood, while splendour , the yacht belonging to her and her husband, robert wagner, was anchored off catalina island, remains one of hollywood's darkest mysteries. the star of splendor in the grass and rebel without a cause , whose tempestuous search for love had led her finally to remarry wagner, was terrified of deep water. how had she ended up in the pacific in the middle of the night drawing on the police report—which includes interviews with wagner, christopher walken (wood's then co-star), and others—as well as details from the yacht's captain, sam kashner reveals the jealousy and rage of that deadly evening..

Natalie Wood's Fatal Voyage Sam Kashner March 2000

"This is the Splendour , needs help." With those words, 51-year-old actor Robert Wagner and Dennis Davern, the captain of Splendour , sounded the alarm around 1:30 A.M., on November 29, 1981, that Wagner's wife, Natalie Wood, had disappeared from the 60-foot yacht the couple owned. Approximately six hours later, Wood's body, clad in only a flannel nightgown, red down jacket, and blue wool socks, was found floating facedown in the Pacific about a mile away, 200 yards off Blue Cavern Point on Catalina Island. Just to the south, Prince Valiant, the 13-foot inflatable dinghy belonging to Splendour , had washed up on the rocks, its ignition key switched to "off," the gearshift in neutral, and the oars up in a locked position.

The death of the 43-year-old actress stunned Hollywood. "It's hard to describe the horror of this thing," said Fred Astaire, a family friend who had played the father of Wagner's character from 1968 until 1970 in the popular television series It Takes a Thief. As both the Coroner's Office and the Sheriff's Department began to investigate, rumors and questions swirled in Hollywood: What had brought Wood, whose fear of deep water was legendary, to leave the yacht in the middle of a cold, starless night and board the dinghy?

"I'm afraid of water that is dark," she had told a journalist just weeks before her death.

As the details of the weekend surfaced, the questions multiplied. Wood had invited the actor Christopher Walken, then 38, with whom she had been filming a science fiction thriller called Brainstorm, to be her guest aboard Splendour over the Thanksgiving weekend. The Wagners, accompanied by Walken and Davern, had sailed to Catalina Island, 22 miles off the California coast, leaving around noon on Friday, November 27. They anchored off Avalon, the island's main town, and went ashore for shopping and a few beers, leaving Davern behind. The following afternoon they sailed to Isthmus Cove, an isolated spot at the northern end of the island with a tiny community that caters to yachtsmen. They dined that evening at Doug's Harbor Reef, the only restaurant on the cove. Some of the restaurant's staff thought the Wagner party was drinking rather heavily and later remembered volatile behavior on Wood's part. After the group departed, Don Whiting, the restaurant's manager, warned Kurt Craig, the harbormaster, to keep an eye out for their safety. They boarded Valiant at about 10 and motored back to Splendour .

"I remember her sitting there saying, I think my biggest fear would be to drown."

What happened next, aboard the yacht, has been a subject of continuing speculation and innuendo. What is definitely known is that Wood retired for the evening. Sometime later Wagner went to check on her and discovered that both she and the dinghy were missing.

A few days after the tragedy, John Payne and his girlfriend, Marilyn Wayne, a Los Angeles commodities broker, contacted police to say they had been sleeping aboard a boat, Capricorn, which was moored near Splendour that night. Around midnight Payne heard a woman yelling, "Help me, someone please help me!" The voice was coming from near the stern of Splendour and, Payne believed, from someone in a dinghy. He awakened Wayne, who heard the cries, too. The couple claimed they hadn't responded because a loud, drunken party was raging on another nearby yacht, and they had thought someone was just "playing around." Indeed, they had heard a man's very drunken voice respond mockingly, "O.K., honey, we'll get you." They believed the voice belonged to someone at the party, which evidently reinforced their notion that the whole thing was a joke.

T he public face in the ensuing investigations was that of Thomas Noguchi, chief medical examiner in the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office. The autopsy revealed that Wood had died of drowning, and that her body had "superficial skin bruises" on the arms and lower legs and a vertical abrasion on the left cheek, such as might have been caused by falling into the water. The toxicology report showed that her blood-alcohol level was at least .14 percent—.04 percent above the level used in California to determine intoxication in automobile drivers.

At a November 30, 1981, press conference to announce the autopsy results, Noguchi trod gingerly, downplaying Wood's apparent inebriation at the time of her death and any other sensational aspects of the case. The coroner was already under fire for his handling of the death of actor William Holden, who two weeks earlier had emptied a bottle of vodka in his Santa Monica apartment and then tripped, gashing his forehead on a bedside table. He had bled to death, according to Noguchi, probably because he was too drunk to stanch the wound or call for help. (By a strange coincidence, Holden's longtime companion was Stefanie Powers, Robert Wagner's then co-star in the hit television series Hart to Hart. The romantic chemistry on the show had generated speculation about a real-life romance between the two TV stars.) The Hollywood community was outraged that Noguchi had revealed Holden's drunkenness to the press, feeling it was an invasion of the deceased actor's privacy.

From the physical evidence in the Wood case Noguchi concluded that the actress had fallen into the water while trying to board the dinghy; fingernail scratches on Valiant's side showed she had tried to hoist herself up from the water, but since her down jacket would quickly have become waterlogged, she was probably impeded by the extra weight. Evidently she never thought to remove the jacket, perhaps because her judgment was clouded by alcohol. She clung to the dinghy's side as it drifted away from Splendour and the other boats in the harbor, until, finally, overcome by exhaustion and hypothermia, she drowned.

Before his press conference, Noguchi outlined this theory to his staff, only to have one of his colleagues point out, "What the reporters out there are really interested in, Dr. Noguchi, isn't so much whether Natalie Wood was intoxicated or not, but why she left the yacht in the middle of the night. "

Realizing the truth of that statement, Noguchi later wrote, he commissioned a "psychological autopsy" to find out why Wood "felt she should separate herself from her husband and Walken that night." However, when the report "on the real facts of the death of Natalie Wood" came in, Noguchi "decided not to release the document to the press. It added details the media would only call 'gory' and 'sensational.' The report did not alter the official coroner's conclusion of an accidental drowning. So, rather than create more media indignation over 'too many details,' I reluctantly filed away that report."

Noguchi's discretion failed to save his job; complaints from Frank Sinatra and the Screen Actors Guild, among others, continued to accuse him of sensationalizing his duties. He was demoted on April 27, 1982.

I n his 1983 book, Coroner, about his most celebrated cases, Noguchi returned to the mysterious death of Natalie Wood—indeed, he began the book with it. After acknowledging the crucial questions—"Wasn't it strange that the two men on the yacht didn't even know that she had left the boat? Hadn't she spoken to them? Why had she slipped out to the stem of the yacht in the middle of the night, climbed down a ladder, and untied the dinghy? What was she doing? And where was she going? And why?" and also "When she first fell off the swimming step into the water, why didn't she simply swim a few strokes and reboard the yacht by way of the step? It must have been only a few feet away from her. Even with the heavy jacket, she could have accomplished this effort easily"—he proceeded not to answer any of them. Instead, he spun a dramatic yam about Wood's clinging to the dinghy as she attempted to propel it to the beach by kicking her feet.

Through his attorney, Paul Ziffren, and friends, Wagner gave his story, saying that the cruise had been a happy one before ending in the freak accident of Wood's death. Two years later, Walken spoke for the record. "The people who are convinced that there was something more to it than what came out in the investigation will never be satisfied with the truth. Because the truth is, there is nothing more to it. It was an accident." Other than that, the two have maintained silence about the incident. (Both declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Doubts about the accident theory have, in fact, never died down, especially in the tabloid press. The principal reason for that is the only other person on the boat that night: Dennis Davern, who claims he has always believed that something more sinister occurred. Davern, now 51, says that the account he gave to police investigators in the days after Wood's death was incomplete, sanitized, and in some places downright false. Over the years he has offered parts of his story—for money—to various tabloids, and has occasionally appeared on television, most notoriously in February 1992, on Geraldo Rivera's Now It Can Be Told, when he was filmed without his knowledge discussing an argument aboard Splendour and implying that he knew how Wood got into the water. In the early 1990s he visited New York publishers in an unsuccessful attempt to interest them in a book on the subject.

Despite the fact that Davern is not the most savory witness, he tells a compelling story, one that has been fairly consistent in its various public incarnations even as it has grown with damning details. Now, it seems, widespread interest in the case is about to ignite once again, as two new biographies of Wood are in the works (one by Gavin Lambert with the cooperation of Robert Wagner; another, Natasha: The Biography of Natalie Wood, by Suzanne Finstad, author of several true-crime books).

Recently, Vanity Fair spoke with Dennis Davern and also with Duane Rasure, the lead police investigator on the case. Rasure shared a copy of the police report, which at last gives us crucial details and testimony from all involved. Surprisingly, in almost all instances, the interviews with witnesses— waiters, hotel clerks, other yachtsmen, and, most notably, Christopher Walken, whose police interrogation is the only detailed account we have from him—tend to back up Davern's story that Natalie Wood's fatal fall was not simply an accident, as Robert Wagner has maintained, but the final act in a two-day drama of jealousy and rage, fueled by round-the-clock drinking.

I t's as if we always knew her, growing up in America, watching Natalie Wood live out her 43 years in darkened movie theaters across the country. Photoplay and Modern Screen were devoted to her in the 1950s: Wood in a boat-necked shirt, her hair freshly bobbed, feeding the porpoises at Marineland with Nick Adams, her co-star in Rebel Without a Cause; Wood being playfully spanked by handsome, blond Tab Hunter, whom Warner Bros, tried with little success to team romantically with her in The Burning Hills and The Girl He Left Behind.

Her youthful marriage to Robert Wagner, then a promising contract player, was catnip to the fan magazines. The envied couple were often seen nestled in an outsize red banquette at Jean Leon's La Scala in Beverly Hills. Tom Wolfe described Wood's "great big marvelous huge mothering brown eyes," but she was really an American girl, struggling to grow up in film after film, from the doubting child who comes to believe in Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street to the rebellious teenager in Rebel Without a Cause to the yearning high-school girl destined for madness in Splendor in the Grass.

"She was right there at the apotheosis of the 50s," a friend of Wood's once said. After all, she hung out with both James Dean and Elvis Presley. (The two days she spent with the latter in November 1956 in Memphis were a big disappointment. "He can sing," she later confided to her younger sister, Lana, now 54 years old and the head of Lana Wood Casting in Hollywood, "but he can't do much else") She had been a child star for 13 years when, in the summer of 1956, she had her first date with Robert Wagner, known as "R.J." to his friends. She was 18, he was 26. She was the sought-after veteran of 25 films and had just made the rare successful transition to adult actress; he was an aspiring actor at Twentieth Century Fox, the son of a wellto-do steel executive. He had grown up in a house overlooking the Bel-Air Country Club, where he caddied for such stars as Clark Gable and Fred Astaire. His first real break came in 1952 when studio head Darryl F. Zanuck gave him a small role as a shell-shocked soldier in Walter Lang's With a Song in My Heart. Susan Hayward, playing real-life music-hall entertainer Jane Froman, sings to Wagner's tremulous soldier while tears run down his face. Thousands of fan letters poured in, auguring bigger roles to come. Two years later, however, he was stuck playing Prince Valiant in a pageboy wig and a padded body stocking complete with rubber calves. The $3 million CinemaScope epic did all right at the box office, but it was lethal to a budding career as a serious actor. Wagner later recalled wincingly that the Methodtrained actors at the studio used to drop by the set to laugh at his ridiculous getup, and Dean Martin mistook him for Jane Wyman because of his wig.

"I do not know which came first, the end of her marriage or Warren Beatty."

A t the same time, Wood was becoming a different kind of star. In 1955 she had played Judy in Rebel Without a Cause, which established her as a teen idol and won her an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress. (She lost to Jo Van Fleet in East of Eden.) While campaigning for the part, she was briefly hospitalized after a serious car accident with Dennis Hopper, then 18 years old and her co-star in the movie. When Wood was called a "juvenile delinquent" by the police, she was ecstatic and made sure Rebel's 43-year-old director, Nicholas Ray—who had been skeptical because of her good-girl image—knew about it. It wasn't long before the under-age actress fell into an affair with her director, meeting him secretly at the Chateau Marmont, just off Sunset Boulevard. Hopper remembered in Bernard Eisenschitz's Nicholas Ray: An American Journey that he "got into terrible problems" with Ray, "because we were both fucking Natalie Wood.... Nick snitched on me. I was furious with him: the studio came down on me, and he came out of it as pure as snow."

Wagner, on the other hand, cultivated older, established stars, such as Spencer Tracy, who became a mentor after the two worked together in Broken Lance (1954) and The Mountain (1956). Even though "Natalie was running around with people R.J. wouldn't have in his house," as a friend remembers, a romance ignited and became one of the most publicized in the history of Hollywood. Wagner shared his love of boats with Wood. In fact, the two consummated their relationship during a moonlit sail on Wagner's boat My Lady— and, according to Lana Wood, continued to celebrate the anniversary every year.

They were married on December 28, 1957, in Scottsdale, Arizona. Los Angeles Times columnist Joyce Haber later described them as being "the most photographed, talked-about, envied couple since Wally Simpson and Edward VIII." Many speculated that the marriage would boost Wagner's career.

The couple spent much of their honeymoon on the water, first cruising the Florida Keys, where they met with a potential disaster at sea. Writing in Modern Screen in April 1958, gossip columnist Louella Parsons reported that

Mrs. Wagner got on the long distance phone to tell me, "We're just now catching our breath. You've never seen anything like the storm that hit Florida just as we arrived to board the boat we'd chartered for a cruise." ... It was Bob on the telephone now. "The worst storm to hit the Florida coast in fifteen years blows up! ... You'll never believe what was happening to that boat as we tried to make our way back to port. It was pitching like a wild horse. Dishes and glasses were crashing all over the galley.... It was all but impossible for our skipper to see one wave ahead of us. I was so worried about Nat. It was an awful ordeal for her."

After returning to Los Angeles, the newlyweds dropped anchor just off Catalina aboard My Lady. The small island, with its rich Hollywood history, would become a favorite escape. "I love being on the water and near the water," Natalie would later say, "but not in the water."

"Hollywood prepares you for life in front of the camera," Lana Wood once observed, "but it doesn't prepare you for private life."

The writer Thomas Thompson, a close friend of Natalie's who first met her when he was assigned to interview her for Life magazine, recalled that at the beginning of the marriage "Natalie was in emotional ruins." She was insecure and suspicious of everyone, even of Wagner. Controlled by the studios and her ambitious Russian emigre stage mother, Maria Gurdin, who had pushed her into movies when she was only five, Wood suddenly realized that she had no idea who she was—she had spent her life taking on the roles of other people. "I was unable to make a decision of any kind. People had told me what to do all my life," she later said.

Wood had terrible insomnia, lying awake at night trying to figure out why she was so unhappy. She began to rely on sleeping pills and finally told Wagner that she wanted to consult a psychiatrist. "For eight years she spent lunch hours every day— every day!—with her analyst, and she turned down important film roles because they would take her away from the couch," Thompson observed.

I mportant roles nevertheless continued to come her way. Even the box-office disappointments of her two 1958 films, the hotly anticipated Marjorie Morningstar, based on the Herman Wouk best-seller, and Frank Sinatra's Kings Go Forth, didn't knock her off the A-list. Wagner, however, continued to have career troubles. Seven years earlier, he had been spoken of in the same breath with Tony Curtis and Rock Hudson, but Twentieth Century Fox was putting the boyishly handsome actor in such clinkers as Sail a Crooked Ship and Say One for Me.

"Here was Natalie, starring in a major movie like Splendor in the Grass, and here was R.J. doing dogs like Stopover Tokyo," one film director recalled. Wood attempted to resuscitate her husband's career by appearing with him in the 1960 film All the Fine Young Cannibals— an overripe Tennessee Williams knockoff. "I was white trash, looking for money" is how Wood described her role in the film. "Bob was a trumpet player living with a black woman who was a singer. We all wore wigs." The movie was an embarrassing flop. Wagner wouldn't appear on-screen again for nearly two years, while Wood began filming one of her most important movies, William Inge's Splendor in the Grass, opposite Warren Beatty.

With this movie Wood's and Wagner's real troubles began. "I do not know which came first," Lana Wood said, "the end of her marriage or Warren Beatty."

Splendor in the Grass, set in Kansas in the 1920s, was directed by the celebrated stage director Elia Kazan. Wood breaks your heart in the role of Deanie Loomis, who's nearly destroyed in the struggle between her love for her high-school sweetheart, Bud, played with immense appeal by Beatty, and the puritanical tyranny of small-town America, embodied by her interfering mother, played by Audrey Christie. Under Kazan's brilliant direction, Wood has an on-screen breakdown that is almost too painful to watch: Deanie, clad in a red dress, tries to drown herself in a reservoir. (For her work in the film, Wood would win her second Academy Award nomination.)

"Id never in a million years seen them fight like that before... stuff getting thrown around."

Beatty was making his film debut in the movie; he had been championed for the part by Inge, who had become enamored of the handsome actor during the 1959 Broadway run of his play A Loss of Roses, in which Beatty had played the lead. At first, Beatty and Wood did not get along, and there was concern that their love scenes were not generating sparks. Beatty was living with Joan Collins at the time, but at some point during filming, the passionate kissing on-camera began to catch fire. Kazan believed, as he later wrote, that "it was clear to Natalie ... that Warren was bound for the top; this perception was an aphrodisiac." One day Wagner arrived on the set and found Beatty's arm wrapped around Wood's waist while they were waiting for the lights to be set up. Beatty accused Wagner of keeping tabs on them. Wagner reacted with embarrassment and barely controlled rage. Kazan noticed the storm brewing, but he felt that if the budding affair between his two young actors helped their love scenes, he didn't mind. The director regretted only the obvious pain the affair was causing Wagner. What made it even worse, according to Kazan's autobiography, Elia Kazan: A Life, was that Wagner's "sexual humiliation was public."

Wagner finally walked out and went to stay on his boat at Newport Beach. His and Wood's separation and subsequent divorce in 1963 shocked Hollywood. Elizabeth Taylor was said to have become so upset that she had to take to her bed. "Why does she need sedating?" asked Wood, who had a famously competitive relationship with Taylor. "It's my marriage that just collapsed."

To many observers, Wagner suffered the most. His career continued to decline, while Wood's flourished. "It just didn't seem fair," wrote a friend of Wagner's. "It must be admitted, he was probably jealous of her continued success. Natalie, however, had an enormous, single-minded ambition, and nothing was going to stop her."

While her marriage was crumbling, Wood made some of the best films of her career— West Side Story in 1961 and Gypsy in 1962. To help prepare her for the role of the brainy burlesque queen Gypsy Rose Lee, Beatty took her to a strip club to watch two featured strippers: Fran Sinatra and Natalie Should. He also showed up on the set of Gypsy nearly every day.

T he sea would play a dangerous and fateful role throughout Wood's life. While filming Splendor in the Grass, the actress's fear of the water came to Kazan's attention. A few days before shooting the reservoir scene, Wood confided to the director that she had a deep-seated "terror of water, particularly dark water, and of being helpless in it." Kazan, schooled in Stanislavskian method, remembered thinking how perfect that was for the scene. Wood asked him if it couldn't be shot in a small studio tank, but the director refused. He explained that the reservoir was shallow and her feet would always touch bottom. She wasn't reassured, but she did the scene and did it well. But back on dry land, Kazan remembered, Wood shivered with fear and then laughed hysterically with relief.

It was not the First time that Wood's phobia had become an issue. When she was 11, in 1949, on the set of RKO's The Green Promise, she was supposed to cross a bridge that was rigged to collapse once she reached the other side; however, somebody pulled the lever when she was halfway across, and she fell into the water below. "I don't even remember them fishing me out," Wood later recalled.

An even more harrowing incident occurred while filming The Star with Bette Davis in 1952. Ironically, it happened off Catalina, on a freezing January morning. The director, Stuart Heisler, wanted Wood to leap over the railing of Sterling Hayden's private yacht. "Just jump," Heisler told her. "There will be men in rowboats to pick you up." When she hit the water she panicked and began screaming. Davis threatened to quit if they made Wood do the scene again. When they reshot it with a double, the standin became entangled in the kelp and nearly drowned. "After all that," Wood said later, "they cut the scene from the movie."

Four years after making Splendor in the Grass, Wood had yet another heart-stopping moment at sea, while filming a scene with Robert Redford in Santa Monica Bay for Robert Mulligan's Inside Daisy Clover. A giant rogue wave suddenly reared up, separating a small boat containing Wood and Redford from the crew and technicians. Mulligan recalled that "there was no way we could get Natalie and Bob off the boat, and the lines to keep them in place were breaking right and left." Redford thought the whole thing was a lark, but Wood was terrified.

W ith their careers going in opposite directions, who would ever have predicted that Wood and Wagner would be reunited, as they were in 1972. In the nine years between their divorce and remarriage, Wagner moved to Europe to try to change the course of his nearly moribund career. He had better luck there, landing an important cameo in Darryl Zanuck's 1962 World War II epic, The Longest Day, and showing an unexpected gift for light comedy in Blake Edwards's 1964 movie The Pink Panther; he also married his second wife, Marion Marshall Donen, who had recently been divorced from the director Stanley Donen.

"I grew up at last," Wagner has said of the period, during which his good friend Paul Newman offered him the role of a lifetime: that of a weak rich man's son who turns out to be the villain in the 1966 film Harper. "That's the part that made me. For the first time, I got some damn good reviews," he recalled. The whole course of Wagner's career would soon change again, however: he would make his mark not in film but on television.

"In the sixties," Wagner later said about the film business, "everybody was an antihero. There weren't many parts for a guy like me." Then Lew Wasserman, the president of MCA, called Wagner into his office and pulled out a copy of TV Guide. "This is where you belong!" he said. When the opportunity came for Wagner to play the debonair ex-con in the new ABC television series It Takes a Thief, he was ready. Premiering in 1968, the show became a hit, earning Wagner $10,000 per episode and giving him the role—that of "a small-screen version of Cary Grant"—for which he was perfectly suited.

Lana Wood noticed that her sister reacted with dismay when she learned of Wagner's marriage to Donen; she was inconsolable when she heard that the couple was expecting a child. Wagner showed up at La Scala passing out cigars to celebrate the birth of his daughter Katharine in 1964; Natalie happened to be there that night, sitting in "their" booth. When he passed by Wood's table, "they looked at each other across years of melancholy," Thomas Thompson later wrote.

A fter Beatty reportedly picked up the hatcheck girl at Chasen's and left Wood alone and humiliated at the table (Suzanne Finstad, who says she has spoken to almost 400 people for her upcoming biography of Wood, calls this incident "unsubstantiated, recycled gossip"), Wood embarked on a string of paramours: Arthur Loew Jr. (heir to the theater chain); David Niven Jr.; the English actor Tom Courtenay; and Ladislav Blatnik, a Yugoslav playboy shoe magnate who, as a parlor trick, would eat Wood's Baccarat crystal glasses. She was miserable. One afternoon in late 1966, just after Beatty stopped by, she swallowed a handful of sleeping pills. Fortunately she was found by her friend and secretary, Mart Crowley, later a playwright and the author of The Boys in the Band. Crowley saved her life by rushing her to Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Hollywood. "All I know is this," Crowley later said. "Warren came by and they were talking. Then I heard raised voices and Warren left. Natalie went upstairs to her bedroom. That's when she took the pills."

But it wasn't just Beatty or his ill-timed visit; it was an accumulation of sorrows. A journalist who had befriended Wagner had predicted that "Natalie Wood will end up the real loser."

Then Richard Gregson, a charming English agent and producer, rescued her from all that. Their 1969 Russian Orthodox wedding was spectacular, held at the Holy Virgin Mary Cathedral in Los Angeles; Wood's silk wedding dress had been designed by Edith Head. Her good friend Robert Redford was best man. However, the marriage was short-lived; the couple separated just months after the September 29, 1970, birth of their child, a girl they named Natasha (Natalie's Russian name). She threw Gregson out of the house when she reportedly learned he was having an affair.

A few months earlier, Wagner and Marion Donen had filed for divorce. As work took him away from his family for longer periods, the marriage had deteriorated.

Wagner briefly dated Tina Sinatra, even becoming engaged to her and hanging out at the Sinatra compound in Palm Springs. But once Wood had put Gregson out of her life, Wagner came calling.

"Things happened fast," Lana Wood observed. "They fell as hard, if not harder, than they had the first time. They were thrilled and confused."

They chose the 1972 Academy Awards ceremony at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to re-emerge in public as a couple. As they stepped out of a limousine, their appearance caused pandemonium. Lana Wood recalled: "It was a reunion the whole world felt sentimental about."

I n spring 1972, Wood accompanied Wagner to London aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2 on a junket to promote a new television film he'd made with Bette Davis, Madame Sin. But the morning after the couple left New York Harbor for Southampton, a freak storm with 70-foot swells rose up and engulfed the ocean liner for four days. According to Warren G. Harris, author of Natalie and R.J., Wood and Wagner hid out in their cabin, fatalistically drinking champagne and eating caviar. When they emerged unharmed on the other side of the Atlantic, they decided to remarry.

They were married for the second time aboard Ramblin' Rose, a borrowed yacht, on July 16, 1972. The yacht cruised along the California coast and stopped near Malibu at Paradise Cove. After letting the guests off the boat, the newlyweds made their blissful way to Catalina for their second honeymoon.

The history of Catalina is entwined with the history of Hollywood. Clark Gable filmed Mutiny on the Bounty in those island waters; Errol Flynn swashbuckled as Captain Blood off the Catalina coast. The pretty tourist town of Avalon, a one-square-mile village named for the mythical isle where King Arthur's body was taken after his death, inspired the 1920 song "Avalon," one of A1 Jolson's big hits. A film crew once imported a small herd of buffalo for a 1924 movie; their progeny—400 strong—still roam the remote, craggy hills high above the blue waters of the Pacific. Since the 1920s, Hollywood stars including Jean Harlow, John Barrymore, Douglas Fairbanks, Humphrey Bogart, and John Wayne have moored their yachts in Avalon's sparkling harbor.

Throughout their second marriage, Wood and Wagner spent many weekends enjoying the pleasures of Catalina. "Our life started again—really beautifully—on that boat," Wagner told a longtime friend. The waters of Catalina were not supposed to be the scene of a tragedy.

I t is considered bad luck to change the name of a boat, but when Wagner and Wood bought Challenger in 1975, they nevertheless rechristened it Splendour, after a line in Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality." Wood loved the poem, which, as Deanie, she had movingly read in Splendor in the Grass, but she always insisted the name wasn't a reference to Kazan's film, from which she wanted to distance herself because of the infidelity and jealousy that had erupted on the set. Those passions were safely in the past—or were they?

The couple hired the young man who had helped bring the boat from Florida to California to serve as their captain. Dennis Davern had been around boats since he was six years old. His first vessel was a rowboat his parents had bought him when his family lived in Margate City, New Jersey, a suburb of Atlantic City. Davern is still lean, lanky, and agile, though his long hair and beard have darkened. He says he has always loved the sense of freedom the sea gives him. "I was always the black sheep," he says. "Everyone else stayed in New Jersey. I was the one to go."

Davern remembers that " Splendour was a big boat, with four staterooms and a full deck, and handrails all the way around. Even if you don't like boats," he says, "it would be like going on a cruise ship. You'd feel safe.... R.J. only paid 125 grand for it because it wasn't a powerful boat. The original 16-cylinder diesel engine had been replaced with a pair of 8-cylinder diesels, not worth a whole lot, but Natalie wouldn't have cared that the boat was underpowered. She was happy to go along at 10 miles an hour when you're supposed to be going 30. If you went fast in the boat with her in it, you'd be pushing your luck."

Wagner and Wood often included their skipper in festivities aboard Splendour. "With a lot of boat owners, you just try to stay out of the way. But as the years went by, we really got to know each other. We'd barbecue on the boat, and R.J. was the one who liked to put on the steaks, and Natalie would make the salad."

Davern loved working for the Wagners, and was impressed that they brought their children on board for outings almost every other weekend. By 1974 the Wagners' brood had grown to three: Katie, aged 10, from R.J.'s marriage to Marion; Natasha, Natalie's 4-year-old daughter with Gregson; and Courtney, R.J. and Natalie's daughter, bom on March 9, 1974. The couple finally seemed to have all the happiness that had eluded them the first time around. "I'm glad we divorced," Wood once told Thomas Thompson. "The intermission is what did it for us." Wood was fond of quoting Mickey Ziffren (the wife of the Wagners' lawyer Paul Ziffren), who had characterized the couple's nearly 10-year separation as Seitensprung, the German word for switching partners while you're dancing.

W ood and Wagner had switched not just partners but places as well. Wagner was at the apex of his career, portraying the suave Jonathan Hart in Hart to Hart, while Wood wasn't working much. "[Natalie] had a past," Lana Wood observed, "but [R.J.] had the present." And if Wagner's fame as a television star was a few notches below his wife's status as a film icon, so be it: television had made Wagner rich. Besides income from his own successful shows, the Wagners' production company would end up with almost half of the profits from the hit series Charlie's Angels, as part of a deal he had foiled with Aaron Spelling.

If television had rescued Wagner's flagging career, he reasoned, it might do the same for his wife's, so he started easing her into television, beginning with The Affair, in 1973, made when Natalie was pregnant with Courtney. Another television project that delighted her was playing Maggie the Cat opposite Wagner's Brick in Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, with Laurence Olivier as Big Daddy.

"When she had things to do," Davern recalls, "she was excited. She'd get a lot of movie scripts, but nothing would ever come of them."

By 1981, Wood had become a spokeswoman for RainTree's line of beauty products ("Keep your age a secret with RainTree"). Her film career had been in trouble for a long time. After This Property Is Condemned in 1966, there would be only six more films, and a cameo in Robert Redford's The Candidate in 1972. Her role in 1969's hit Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice was seen as something of a comeback, but then followed such flops as the private-eye spoof Peeper, with Michael Caine, in 1975, and the disaster movie Meteor, with Sean Connery and Henry Fonda, in 1979.

Part of the problem was that Natalie was "Old Hollywood even though she wasn't old," Lana Wood said. She was a product of the studio system who came into her maturity when that system was going out of style.

It wasn't just Wood's and Wagner's careers that underwent a reversal of fortune; their private lives followed suit. There was much speculation about the on-camera heat being generated between Wagner and the striking, brunette 39-year-old Stefanie Powers. Although Wood knew that Powers had, for a long time, been William Holden's girlfriend, she was jealous. One day she appeared with Natasha and Courtney on the set of Hart to Hart while Wagner and Powers were filming a love scene. The two girls began to cry, and Wood comforted them by saying, "This is just the way Daddy makes a living."

T hese were some of the pressures the couple took with them on weekend outings to Catalina. Davern recalls how he'd often "knock down a few bottles of wine with [Natalie and R.J.] Natalie was the real partyer. I'd tell her, 'I'll give you five quaaludes if you give me 10 Valiums,' because at that time I liked taking a Valium in the morning and floating all day long.... So it would be, 'Let's eat these quaaludes, let's chase them down with some wine.' They had total trust in me, so they could do anything they wanted."

The captain of Splendour was well aware of Wood's fear of the water. "We could sit in Catalina, on the mooring cable, and R.J. and the kids would be swimming off the back of the boat, and me and Natalie would be on the bridge.... We were each other's therapists sometimes. I remember her sitting there saying, 'I think my biggest fear would be to drown.' ... I remember it was a sunny day when she said that."

But it wasn't a sunny day when Wood invited Christopher Walken to join her and Wagner on Splendour over the 1981 Thanksgiving weekend. It was gray and cold, and the sea was rough.

Walken, who had won an Academy Award for best supporting actor in Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter two years earlier, was co-starring with Wood in Brainstorm, a science-fiction thriller, which also featured Louise Fletcher, who had won the bestactress Oscar in 1976 for One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Cliff Robertson, who had won best actor in 1969 for Charly.

According to Davern, Wood became infatuated with Walken during the filming and openly flirted with him. "When they were in North Carolina together, rumors were going around about Chris Walken and Natalie, so R.J. went down there," Davern explains. "He had a few days off from Hart to Hart ... but he wasn't about to make a fool of himself over this." Lana Wood also believed her sister had an infatuation with Walken. In her 1984 book, Natalie, Lana wrote, "I don't know if Natalie's [love affair] with Chris was imaginary or real, though my strong suspicion is that it was all in her mind and that perhaps she was only wishing it to be so." At least it seems that no romantic intrigue occurred on the set of Brainstorm, because Walken's wife, Georgianne, had been present for the duration of the shoot.

Then, out of the blue, Davern got word that Walken was coming on the boat for a weekend cruise to Catalina. "I don't think R.J. knew Christopher," Davern says. "He was more the young movie star, where R.J. had been around for years." It was a volatile situation, which may have been why Wood also invited Mart Crowley, who had been made a producer on Hart to Hart, and Peggy Griffin, her secretary. Both begged off, pleading too much work.

D avern didn't like Walken from the moment he appeared on the dock at Marina del Rey. The weather was miserable. "The heaters were on in the boat. We were only doing it because of Christopher ... who comes on board wearing a navy pea coat with the collar up. I don't know this guy from Adam, and I guess I felt the way R.J. felt."

They left around noon on Friday. Davern says he noticed that Wagner seemed put out by all the attention Wood was lavishing on their guest. "Christopher and Natalie are sitting in the salon together and giggling, and I'm looking at R.J. and thinking, He doesn't look too happy. R.J. was getting annoyed, and plus, we're drinking.... I was seeing R.J. getting mad. The boat just starts getting smaller. You can't look for a whole lot of escape."

Shortly after they left port, however, Walken got seasick and spent most of the rest of the crossing sleeping in his stateroom. When he emerged, the yacht was already in the harbor at Avalon. Since there were no moorings available, they had to anchor a quarter-mile off Avalon's Casino Ballroom, built in 1929 by William Wrigley, the chewinggum tycoon. Around five P.M., Wagner, Wood, and Walken went into town, while Davern stayed aboard to make dinner.

The trio shopped at a number of boutiques and then headed for El Galleon, a restaurant facing the harbor. They had a few beers and discussed how to get one of Avalon's jewelers to lower his prices. Darkness was falling when they reboarded Splendour, where Davern was preparing a barbecue. Walken, still feeling ill, decided to skip dinner and returned to his stateroom to lie down.

Then, according to a December 10, 1981, interview Davern had with police (in the presence of two attorneys, Stephen Miller and Mark Beck, whom Wagner had hired), since it was "'a grumpy sea' ... R.J. wanted to move the position of the boat, and Natalie said it wouldn't do any good ... [so] she said she would rather spend the night ashore."

Wagner's interview with police, on December 4, 1981, largely agreed with this story: "The sea was pretty rough. He [Wagner] recalled he did move the Splendour closer to shore to get out of the heavy sea. There had been some disagreement as to this move by Natalie and he told her to take Dennis [Davern], the captain, ashore and stay in a hotel for the night."

Today, however, Davern tells a different story about what happened: "There was some kind of argument going on. Christopher went down to take a nap or something, and Natalie and R.J. started fighting. I thought, I don't believe this! I don't believe this fight is still going on. This was later in the afternoon. Natalie says to R.J., 'You're being so silly.' It went back and forth and back and forth. Natalie finally says to R.J., 'I'm going ashore,' and she asks me, 'Dennis, will you take me ashore?'"

Wood wanted to leave, Davern says, because "the tension on the boat was unbearable." She had had enough and wanted to go home. Concerned that the fighting was getting out of hand, Davern says, he knocked on Walken's stateroom door and asked him to intervene. Walken refused, cautioning him, "Never get involved in an argument between a man and a wife."

Walken's main interview with police, which took place on December 3, 1981, in the actor's room (No. 601) at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, corroborates Davern's new version that an argument occurred between Wood and Wagner: "Being very ill he [Walken] returned to his bunk. He stated he felt he was aware of some kind of hubbub up above. There was no yelling. Approximately 20 minutes later he thought he heard the sound of an anchor chain. He then recalled Natalie coming to the door of his cabin and telling him, 'He wants to cross during the night.' He then recalled she left. He next remembered the captain contacting him and wanting him to come up to get involved. He stated he told the captain, 'Never get involved in an argument between a man and a wife.'"

Davern took Wood ashore in Valiant (which Wagner had jokingly named after what he considered his worst film) and the two headed for El Galleon. There, according to Paul Reynolds, the manager of the restaurant, in his police interview of November 29, 1981, they "requested to use the telephone to see if they could locate rooms for the night. He [Reynolds] stated he asked the victim if she had a boat and she replied 'no, is there a boat going back.' He advised her that the f next boat returning from the mainland would be at 10 a.m. the following morning. Mr. Reynolds then made a telephone call to the Pavilion Lodge [a nearby hotel in Avalon] and reserved two rooms for Ms. Wood. He further said Ms. Wood and this other man were sitting at the bar having a couple of drinks prior to leaving for the hotel."

T he Pavilion Lodge was not chosen for privacy—the rooms face an interior court off Avalon's main street, right on the harbor—but it was one of the few hotels that had rooms available on such short notice. Ann Laughton, the night receptionist at the Pavilion Lodge, recalled for police in her November 29, 1981, interview that Wood and Davern arrived at 11:15 P.M. and registered for two rooms. "[Laughton] further recalled that during registration they had asked her for some ice and she had shone [sic] them how to get it from the ice machine. She further added that they both appeared very intoxicated."

On November 29, 1981, in the first of his two interviews with police, at the sheriff's station at Isthmus harbor, Davern told police that "all four of them spent the night on the boat." The police, however, had prior knowledge that this wasn't true. They confronted Davern with his lie, and the boat captain "stated before answering that he'd rather talk to 'R.J.' and possibly an attorney." In his second interview, on December 10, in the presence of Wagner's attorneys, Davern admitted he had spent the night with Wood, because, in the Dragnet prose of the police report, "whenever Ms. Wood, victim, went ashore, he was usually directed to go with her to act as her bodyguard."

Davern now clarifies that he ended up staying in the room with Wood. "We just drank the wine and went to sleep," he says. "We thought it was best for me to stay with her, for protection. She knew I wasn't going to make any kind of play for her—she was comfortable with me."

The police report confirms that Socorro Meza, an employee at the Pavilion Lodge, told investigators that Davern's room "had the appearance of being unused." Walken and Wagner spent the night on Splendour .

T he next morning, according to Linda Winkler, a day clerk at the Pavilion Lodge, Wood "looked fine but seemed somewhat disoriented." Winkler told police on November 30, 1981, that "during [their] conversation Ms. Wood had asked where she could catch boat transportation back to the mainland and [Winkler] had directed Ms. Wood to the proper location. Ms. Winkler further told investigators she'd been amazed at the fact that a movie star like Ms. Wood would be taking public transportation back to the mainland."

Then Wood changed her mind. With middle age, she had become particularly self-conscious about her appearance. Though still beautiful, she had complained to Lana about the accumulating years: "I'm fighting every damn one." Perhaps more important, she didn't want to abandon Walken, who was still aboard Splendour , so she and Davern returned to the yacht.

Walken told police that "he was awakened the next morning by Natalie, and she made some remark about she was going to take the sea plane back and wanted to know if he was staying. He recalled making the statement to her, 'I'm not in this.'"

So Wood went to work rustling up a big breakfast of huevos rancheros for everyone. "Everyone acted like nothing happened," Davern recalls, "and everything was beautiful again."

A t around 11 A.M., R.J. took the boat up to Isthmus Cove, at the other end of the island. Out on the water, Walken told police, "Robert Wagner was trying to talk him into doing some fishing and setting up some fishing poles. He [Walken] recalled R.J. thanking him for smoothing everything over."

After they arrived that afternoon in Isthmus Cove, Davern recalled, Wood sat in the main salon and read while he, Wagner, and Walken went to their staterooms to take naps. After Walken woke up, he and Wood went ashore in Valiant, settled into Doug's Harbor Reef, and began drinking. Sometime later Wagner and Davern took the water taxi to shore and joined them.

Davern says now that when they arrived Walken and Wood "were out of it—giggling and laughing. Me and R.J. are pretty sober— we don't drink around the clock."

Michelle Mileski, a waitress at the restaurant, told police on November 29, 1981, that Wagner and Davern had preceded Walken and Wood at the bar. Then when Wagner made reservations for an early dinner, Wood had expressed dissatisfaction with the wine list, stating, "We could go shopping on the Splendour and get our own wine." Davern remembers that he and Walken returned to Splendour for that purpose. Aboard Valiant, Davern says, he and Walken smoked a joint, so when they returned to the restaurant with some wine, he felt "right in tune with Christopher and Natalie—high as a kite."

The party's waitress, Tina Quinn, told police in a November 29, 1981, interview that "during this dinner party [the Wagner foursome] consumed the two bottles of wine and that [one of the men] had been drinking daiquiris, further she remembered that other parties in the bar had bought two bottles of champagne for the Wagner party. During the meal she said the victim did not eat much of her dinner and was doing a lot of the complaining about small things such as there was too much light on the table, the table was too big, the fish was not fresh, and it appeared to the witness that the victim was not in the best of moods. Ms. Quinn recalled an incident where she saw the victim throw a water glass to the floor.... As they were starting to leave she recalled Robert Wagner lifting a large dark colored jacket and she felt it was being used as a shield because the victim appeared to be stumbling slightly. She then recalled all of the Wagner party leaving together and it was her opinion they were not in the best of moods. She clarified this statement saying that throughout the evening the victim appeared to be in changing moods, sometimes laughing and sometimes solemn."

Don Whiting, the restaurant manager, recalled for police, also on November 29, 1981, that "he thought at the time there was some possible problems between Robert Wagner and his wife, the victim. He remembered some glass was broken, possibly thrown. He was of the impression that Robert Wagner was a little bit irritated with his wife."

Walken later explained away the brokenglass incident to police by saying, "It was my fault. I was making a toast while drinking. At the conclusion of this toast, I threw my glass to the floor as I always do. I remember Natalie, and I think everybody else, did the same."

Whatever the reason, it wasn't the first time Wood had broken a wineglass when angered or upset. According to Lana Wood, Natalie had crushed a crystal glass in her hand the day that Wagner had left the house after the demise of their first marriage. She re-created the gesture in the television drama The Affair in a scene in which Wagner's character abandons her.

Davern recalls today that throughout dinner Wood "was definitely flirting with [Walken]. They were like all giggling and touching. She was excited by Christopher— here's this good-looking guy." Wood didn't want to return to the boat after dinner, Davern says.

Both William Peterson, the shore-boat operator, and Kurt Craig, in the harbor-patrol office, told police that they watched the Wagner party board Valiant and motor back to their yacht. Craig later told police that as the four were descending the ramp to the dinghy "what he described as a scream [came] from the female. He thought she may have been drunk and was unhappy at something that happened at the restaurant."

A t his press conference Thomas Noguchi stated that, according to information he had obtained from police investigators, a "nonviolent argument" had occurred aboard the yacht just prior to Wood's disappearance. This electrified the media.

To quell the ensuing rumors, Robert Wagner put out his version of the final hours. This is how it's quoted in the 1986 hagiography Heart to Heart with Robert Wagner:

We reached the boat in a happy frame of mind after spending a few hours at the restaurant eating and drinking. During dinner, I got into a political debate with Walken and we continued it aboard the yacht. There was no fight, no anger. Just a lot of words thrown around like you hear in most political discussions such as "you don't know what you are talking about!" Natalie sat there not saying much of anything and looking bored. She left us after about a half hour, and we sat there talking for almost another hour. Then I went to kiss her good night, and found her missing.

Wagner goes on to theorize about how Wood had gotten into the water:

It was only after I was told that she was dressed in a sleeping gown, heavy socks, and a parka that it dawned on me what had really occurred. Natalie obviously had trouble sleeping with that dinghy slamming up against the boat. It happened many, many times before, and I had always gone out and pulled the ropes tighter to keep the dinghy flush against the yacht. She probably skidded on one of the steps after untying the ropes. The steps are slick as ice because of the algae and seaweed that's always clinging to them. After slipping on the steps, she hit her head against the boat.... I only hope she was unconscious when she hit the water.

Wagner's two interviews with police were even less detailed. In the first, at 9:54 on the morning of the tragedy, he stated simply that "they were in the Salon when victim [Wood] went below to her bedroom. Shortly after they noticed she and the [Valiant] were missing." Since Wagner "was in an emotional state," the interview was terminated almost immediately. In the somewhat more detailed December 4 interview, Wagner related only that "after they were aboard awhile, Natalie went down to bed and at this point in time, he recalled Chris Walken stepping out on deck for awhile. When Chris returned inside the salon, they continued talking. He estimated approximately 15 minutes passed. When he went to check on Natalie he noticed she was gone."

When the police pressed Wagner "as to the discussion they had had prior to her going to bed," he told them "it was about her being away from home and the kids so much_He missed her being around."

When questioned about the broken glass which police investigators had found in the main salon of Splendour in their search of the boat that began at 12:45 P.M. the day of the tragedy, Wagner explained that "it was probably from the rough seas."

Davern, in his December 10 police interview, was a bit more forthcoming, but not much: "He recalled that RJ and Natalie got into a discussion about her being gone and how RJ missed her. During the discussion Chris Walken entered into it, supporting Natalie's views. He felt RJ was getting upset over this and Chris Walken getting up and going outside around this time. Natalie went to the master stateroom to go to bed. Chris Walken came back into the main salon and he was going to bed. Here this was normal procedure for Natalie. In the evening she would just leave, prepare herself for bed, and usually return after ten or fifteen minutes to say goodnight.... After some time past [SIC], he stated, RJ went to see where Natalie was. When they noticed she was gone, about the same time they noticed the [Valiant] was gone."

Today, however, Davern tells a different and darker story: Back on board, he says, he offered to make tea for everyone. "While the tea is brewing, the wine is flowing. We opened another bottle [probably Wood's favorite, Pouilly-Fuissé]. Then Natalie lit her beeswax candles. R.J. was drinking scotch by then, and I joined him. So we're sitting there, and Chris and Natalie are giggling and carrying on, the same as before, totally forgetting that me and R.J. are there. I'm saying to myself, Oh my God, this is getting to be too much right now.

"All of a sudden," Davern says, "R.J. grabbed a bottle of wine and smashes it right on the table in front of them. Glass goes flying all over. '"Jesus Christ,' R.J. says to Christopher, 'what are you trying to do, fuck my wife?'

"Christopher got up in two or three seconds and headed right out the door. Now Natalie says, 'I'm not standing for this a minute longer!' She goes down to her stateroom and slams her door. Christopher goes right down to his stateroom. Now I'm left alone with R.J. I say, 'R.J., let's just calm down.' We stayed up there for a little while, then R.J. says, 'I'm going to go down there and see Natalie.'"

Davern says that as he remained on the bridge, located right over the Wagners' stateroom, he could hear the couple "fighting like crazy.... I'd never in a million years seen them fight like that before. I just couldn't believe it.... You know, stuff getting thrown around." It was, according to Davern, a ferocious argument fueled by drink—"so hot and heavy that it got carried out into the cockpit" at the rear of the yacht. Davern says he next heard "the dinghy being untied— you can hear the ropes, the bowline being tugged on."

And then, Davern says, there was silence. It seemed like a long time to him before Wagner, "tousled, sweating profusely, as if he had been in a terrible fight, an ordeal of some kind," came back up to the bridge, where the two men emptied another bottle of wine.

Davern says that it was about 11:30 when Wagner returned. "We were up there drinking until 1:$0 in the morning. Then R.J. said, 'I'd better go back down and check on Natalie.'"

After a few minutes, Wagner appeared and told the captain, "She's gone."

"She's gone? Where the hell is she?"

"I don't know."

Davern decided to go look for her. "I thought maybe she went into my stateroom, feeling she could confide in me. So I went up and she's not there. So I looked in the empty stateroom—nothing. I look in Christopher's stateroom. He's in the top bunk and he's asleep. I looked in his bathroom, and thank God she's not in Christopher's room. I knew that wouldn't happen, because there's too much rage going on. So I go back up and say, 'She's not down below.'"

Davern walked out on deck to look for her, and that's when he noticed that Valiant was gone.

Davern was baffled. He believes that if Wood had decided to return to shore at night he would certainly have been asked to go with her. "If the stars aren't out, it's total darkness. There's no place to go. Darkness all around. I wouldn't go out on [Valiant] at night."

Davern says he then told Wagner that he was going to turn on Splendour' s floodlights in order to look for her, but Wagner told him not to: "Dennis, don't turn that on." Davern then offered to fire up the yacht's engines and cruise around looking for Wood. According to Davern, Wagner refused.

"Don't do that. Let's think about this. We don't want to do anything, Dennis, because we don't want to alert all these people," Davern says Wagner told him.

W ith the police report, we at last have Christopher Walken's description of the crucial hours preceding the tragedy. It is a story closer to Davern's than to Wagner's. In the first of his two interviews, at 10 on the morning of the tragedy, he told police, "After they were aboard the boat he and Robert Wagner got into a small beef. He left the cabin and went outside on deck for a few minutes, when he returned victim [Wood] was sitting there and she seemed to be disturbed. He recalled she then went to her room and he thought she had gone to bed. He next remembered the captain dennis make [sic] a remark 'the dinghy is gone.'"

Walken's more detailed, December 3 interview produced this version:

They were in the salon talking; he [Walken] stated they had all been drinking and they had one of those conversation [sic] going were [sic]—and he used the reference—"you put all your cards on the table." RJ was making statements and complaining that she was away from home too much. She was away from the kids, it was hurting their home life. Mr. Walken stated he also got involved with discussion supporting the victim's views—she was an actress, she was an important person, this was her life. He suddenly realized he was violating his own view about getting involved in an argument between a man and a wife. He stepped outside for some air and when he returned, everybody was apologizing, particularly Robert Wagner and everything seemed fine.

D uane Rasure is a big man—six feet three— who dresses like a cowboy now that he's in retirement from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, Homicide Bureau. He and his wife, Joy, live in a remote town in Arizona called Eagar. Rasure still wears a belt buckle that proudly displays the number 187, the number of the section of California's penal code for murder. When he got the call to investigate the Wood drowning, he had been a homicide detective for 11 years. He and his partner had helped break the case of the Hillside Strangler in the late 70s.

"They called me about 8:30 in the morning. They told me I got the case of Natalie Wood drowning in Catalina, which surprised me. The news threw my wife into shock, and from then on it was a matter of getting dressed, heading for the heliport, where I was transported to Catalina to do my investigation."

Twenty minutes after Rasure's arrival, a helicopter brought Wagner and Walken to the sheriff's office on the island. "I introduced myself and my partner [Roy Hamilton] to Wagner, and told him what we were going to do. I could see he's at a loss. He's just in trouble. He's hurting. It took just a short time to get a general idea of what had happened. It seemed accidental from the first, probably because of the way I got the information—the way it was presented: 'Someone fell overboard and drowned.' Nothing in the world would make us think at the time that there might have been something suspicious."

Rasure would soon feel the pressure of the investigation. He started getting calls from old friends who knew he'd been assigned to the case. Quite a few tough homicide detectives were touched by Wood's death. "They would call me up," Rasure recalls, "and say, 'Duane, tell me what happened. I loved that girl. I watched her grow up.'"

A week after the drowning, at one in the afternoon on December 4, Rasure visited Wagner's home in Beverly Hills in order to question the actor a second time. "The first time I interviewed him he was just as cooperative as could be," Rasure recalls. "But I didn't get enough information at the heliport. So I went to interview him again, and his attorney says, 'I don't think so. I think you have enough.'

"At that time, we had a sheriff who was a very powerful man here," Rasure explains. "We went to lunch, and I told him I was having this little handicap, this little problem with this attorney, and he says, 'Oh.' I had my appointment [with R.J.] the following day."

Rasure arrived and was taken upstairs. Wagner was in bed during the entire interview, with his lawyer Paul Ziffren in the room. "I let him tell me what happened, going into more detail." Once again, Rasure was satisfied. Roy Hamilton would tell the Los Angeles Times that "we talked to Wagner and Walken and there was no indication that there was any argument." (This is rather astonishing, considering the police interviews with Walken.)

Despite the fact that there were obvious inconsistencies in the testimony of the three principal witnesses, the police investigation was closed on December 11, less than two weeks after the tragedy, with the conclusion of "accidental drowning." Rasure, who subscribes to the theory that Wood slipped while trying to retie the dinghy, says, however, that he doesn't really know for sure what happened to the actress.

"I can't tell you exactly how she got in the water," he says today.

A s a witness, Dennis Davern presents many problems. The first is why he didn't initially tell police the version he tells today, rather than letting it out piecemeal to journalists and tabloids over the almost 20 years that followed.

Davern claims that in the days after the tragedy he became a virtual prisoner in Wagner's Beverly Hills home: at first, he and R.J. would wake around 10 each morning and "cry on each other's shoulders, with a scotch glass in one hand and an arm around each other." After several weeks, however, it slowly dawned on Davern, he says, that it would be very difficult to leave. He had a girlfriend he wanted to visit, and he began to wonder when and how he could go see her. She had already come to the house and had been rebuffed, he alleges. "When the alarm system kicked in at night, you couldn't even open your door. It was like being in a vault. The first night I was there, I wanted to go downstairs to watch television, but I couldn't get out.... There was no phone in the room. I couldn't walk out the front doorsomebody was always there, usually R.J.'s bodyguard. I felt really closed in."

"In the daytime," Davern says, "I would go downstairs and the staff would say, 'Let me make you some drinks, Dennis.' I'd go to the bar, pour a scotch, and R.J. would be up in his bedroom. It was like this for three months."

"When I look back on it," Davern now says, "I was a pure idiot. I had turned into a real drunk. I felt that I was a part of R.J., that he was going to make sure that Dennis was O.K."

Davern says that Wagner went as far as to bring him to his own psychotherapy sessions. "I was having dreams like crazy. I'd wake up with some weird dreams. And R.J. said, 'Dennis, I'm having bad dreams, too.' So R.J. and I would go to his shrink together. We would sit down, sometimes in the same session, sometimes alone."

O n December 2, 1981, Wood was buried in Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery while a balalaika played softly under the warm afternoon sun. Robert Wagner plucked gardenias from Natalie's casket, handing one each to Wood's mother, to her sisters, and to her daughters. Then he bent down and kissed the gold-trimmed white coffin.

After the funeral, Davern says, reporters began tailing him, trying to get his story by posing as potential boat buyers or by luring him with beautiful women. He claims one tabloid offered him $200,000. When Davern told Wagner about the offer, Davern recalls, he cautioned him, "Dennis, they're never going to pay you." He further warned Davern that the F.B.I. would be asking him questions, and Natalie's fans would be after him. "So I was cut off from everybody.... They said they were protecting me."

Wagner got Davern into the Screen Actors Guild, Davern says, and although Davern had never acted before in his life, he started getting small roles on commercials and on Hart to Hart. "He [Wagner] used to give me checks," Davern recalls, "a thousand, two thousand. My friends said it was hush money and that R.J. wouldn't want anything to do with me after Splendour was gone. I used to tell them that R.J. wasn't like that, that he was a real friend to me."

Davern eventually decided to get his yacht broker's license and live on the boat while he tried to sell it for R.J. It was his way, he felt at the time, to escape finally from R.J.'s protective scrutiny. "I took the boat somewhere where nobody would know it. I had a friend up in Oxnard who had a house with a dock in the back. So I took the Splendour up there. But nobody wanted anything to do with this yacht. It had become a bastard boat." Wagner ended up donating it to the Sea Scouts, a youth boating club.

O nce Splendour and Wagner were out of his life, Davern made his way back to South Florida. In the intervening years, the former sea captain has resurfaced periodically to try to tell his version of what happened that night. He has not been his own best advocate, holding back information and implying that he knows more than he's saying. He sold part of his story to the Globe ("World Exclusive, NATALIE WOOD, the Shocking Truth About Her Death"), revealing that an argument occurred with Walken in the salon, but not revealing the alleged details and severity of the subsequent argument between Wagner and Wood in their stateroom.

There was also a disastrous appearance on Geraldo Rivera's Now It Can Be Told in 1992, 10 years after the drowning, in which Rasure and Davern were asked to give their account of what happened that night for a "jury" comprising Raoul Felder and two other trial lawyers. By now Davern was writing a book about his experiences, and he arrived at the television studio with his coauthor, a longtime friend named Margaret "Marti" Rulli. But he found the interview hard going, and he interrupted it several times so he could confer with Rulli offcamera. Then Davern was prompted, "They were yelling and screaming at each other to get off the boat ..." He responded, "Oh God, I don't know if I can tell them that or not." Rulli, exasperated, replied, "Ten years of this, Dennis! This needs to be cleared up! We have to say how she got in the water, Den." But Rulli changed her mind—or perhaps just realized how stubborn Davern could be—and she said, "Don't you tell them how she got into the water.... We put that in the book and we'll make billions from it."

Without their knowledge, Davern and Rulli were being filmed in their unguarded moments "off-camera," and that's what was televised on Now It Can Be Told. Rivera then essentially dismissed Davern's testimony as compromised, but asked his panel of lawyers to comment anyway. All three agreed: the important fact was that Davern modified his police testimony, which almost always warrants a new investigation. Their unanimous verdict: reopen the case.

After the taping, Wagner sent Davern a letter warning him not to discuss the matter further.

Davern and Rulli also pounded the sidewalks trying to sell their manuscript to New York publishers. Davern says, "We went up to this publishing house and they said, 'Who's your agent?' They must have thought we were total jerks! Nothing ever came of it. But it's a good thing it never worked out—I never even told Marti the whole story."

One former book editor, who met with the two, remembers being "chilled and intrigued by their tale, but we didn't see how they could stretch it out into a full-length book. Also, we wondered where was the backup for his story. It was basically his word against Wagner's."

I n Coroner, Noguchi admitted he had trouble with Wagner's theory that Wood was bothered by the noise of the dinghy striking the side of the boat and slipped into the water while trying to retie it. "I found that theory plausible," wrote Noguchi, "particularly because it explained her nightgown-and-socks apparel. And yet there was a possible flaw. The dinghy was rubber, and, according to Paul Miller, our expert who owned a similar boat [which by another curious coincidence in the case was moored to the same buoy, in front of Splendour, the night Wood died], a rubber dinghy makes little or no noise when it strikes a yacht." (But, Noguchi allowed, "silence is relative.... Other sailors say that the noise might be amplified to an annoying degree.")

In addition, Noguchi wrote, "forensic evidence, such as the fingernail scratches on the side of the dinghy, the brush-type abrasion on her cheek, and the untouched algae on the swim step, seemed to indicate that she was trying to board the dinghy, not just adjust its rope, when the accident happened."

In the end, Noguchi, like Rasure, is not really sure how and why Wood ended up in the water. Perhaps Noguchi knows more than he is telling, thanks to his unreleased "psychological autopsy." In a brief phone interview, he claims the document could be found with both the police report and the autopsy report. Scott Carrier, the information officer at the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office, says, "I have no idea where that report would be. Everything that was in the Natalie Wood file was sent to you. We have no additional reports."

Davern says he has stopped trying to make money off his tale. He claims he recently turned down a $50,000 offer from a tabloid, although he still hopes the book he began writing many years ago about his life with the Wagners might one day be published. "I think she deserves an explanation for her death," he says. He still has dreams about being aboard Splendour. He's married now and raising three young children on a quiet street in a small Florida town, where he paints and restores boats. He named his first child Natasha.

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A MOVIE MARKED DANGER

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Twilight of the Goddess

CONTINENTAL RIFT

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