Natalie Wood was beautiful.
She was exotic.
She had been a movie star since she was a child and she wanted to be a movie star again.
And then, on Nov. 29, 1981, she was dead.
Mysteriously dead.
Dead face down in the cold, dark ocean. Dead after a night of drinking with two handsome men, one her husband and one not her husband.
Beautiful dame, tragic end. It’s a story as eternal as Hollywood.
It’s also a story in search of an ending.
Small wonder that 30 years later, news that the Los Angeles Police Department is reopening the case sucked us right back into it.
Wood and her husband Robert Wagner, then starring in the TV hit “Hart to Hart,” had arranged to spend Thanksgiving weekend 1981 on their yacht off Santa Catalina Island.
Captain Dennis Davern sailed the boat and they were joined by actor Christopher Walken, who was co-starring with Wood in the almost-finished sci-fi flick “Brainstorm.”
Around midnight Friday, Wagner and/or Davern realized Wood was missing, along with the boat’s dinghy. As dawn broke on Saturday, a helicopter spotted Wood’s body, about a mile from the yacht and a mile from the dinghy.
She was wearing a flannel nightgown, knee-high socks and a thick, red, down jacket. She had bruises on her head and body. When she was pulled out, she was pronounced dead.
Police concluded she had decided to take the dinghy to shore, then slipped and fallen into the water. Her waterlogged jacket prevented her from climbing back into the dinghy and if she cried for help, no one on the 55-foot Splendour was close enough to hear.
Los Angeles coroner Thomas Noguchi thought Wood launched the dinghy, but fell overboard and died of hypothermia.
Either way, the verdict was accidental drowning. Three days later, Natalie Wood was buried. She was 43.
Her younger sister Lana has been convinced for years that the official verdict is incomplete. For starters, says Lana, Natalie would never have tried to launch the dinghy wearing a nightgown.
What apparently helped spur the LAPD to reopen the case, though, is a provocative change in Captain Davern’s story. Contrary to his original statements to police, he now says Wagner is hiding some guilt.
The 1981 coroner’s report says Wagner “immediately radioed for help” when he realized Wood was missing.
Davern now says Wagner told him not to call the Coast Guard and refused to turn on the boat’s searchlight.
Davern also says there had been tension all weekend between Wagner and Walken. During one argument, says Davern, Wagner smashed a wine bottle on the table and asked if Walken was trying to sleep with his wife.
Shortly before Wood disappeared, says Davern, she and Wagner had an animated argument.
Davern told David Gregory on “The Today Show” that this argument led to Wood’s death — though he declined to be more specific, that is, whether he felt Wood was trying to flee the tension.
Los Angeles police say Wagner is not a suspect.
They also say Walken is not a suspect.
Walken, who has rarely discussed that night, said in a 1982 interview that there was no fighting, that his hosts were gracious and the weekend cordial. He has now hired a lawyer.
Lana Wood told Piers Morgan Friday night that it’s Wagner who needs to clear things up.
“Only RJ and Natalie know what happened,” she said. “And only one of them can speak.”
What also can’t be ignored here is a familiar character in many tragic dramas: John Barleycorn.
On Friday afternoon, Wood, Wagner, Walken and Davern rode the dinghy ashore to Doug’s Harbor Reef restaurant at Catalina Isthmus. They hit the bar around 4 p.m. and weren’t seated for dinner until 7.
Waitresses say they had more bottles of Champagne and a seemingly tipsy Wood was flirting with Walken.
When they left around 10, they all seemed intoxicated enough that the night manager of Doug’s called the Harbor Patrol to ensure they made it back to the Splendour.
If Wood later fell into the water because she was half-drunk, that would tack a cheap ending onto a story that began with incandescence.
Born in San Francisco to Russian immigrant parents, Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko was a star almost from the word “Mama.”
When she was 7, after she played in Orson Welles‘ “Tomorrow is Forever,” Welles said she was “so good it’s terrifying.”
The 1947 “Miracle on 34th Street” made her a child star at 9. At 16, a year before she graduated from high school, she scored an Academy Award nomination for playing James Dean‘s friend Judy in “Rebel Without a Cause.”
She added Oscar nominations in 1961 for “Splendor in the Grass,” opposite Warren Beatty, and in 1963 for “Love with the Proper Stranger,” opposite Steve McQueen.
She carved a musical niche as Maria in “West Side Story” and Louise in “Gypsy.”
Meanwhile, in 1957 she married Wagner. They divorced in 1962.
In the mid-’60s, after a life on camera, she said she needed to dial back. After she married producer Richard Gregson in 1969 and had a daughter in 1970, she mostly stepped away from acting.
She and Gregson divorced in 1972 and three months later she married Wagner again. She had another daughter in 1974 and limited her work to TV projects like “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and “From Here To Eternity.”
When she died, she was trying to get back to where she had been, never easy for a woman over 40 in Hollywood.
In a bitter if familiar Hollywood irony, it was her death that put her back on the front page and showed how big a star she remained.
Natalie Wood simply had magnetism. Even when she only appeared for a few minutes at the end of John Wayne‘s masterpiece “The Searchers,” as a girl kidnapped and raised by Comanches, she radiated stardust.
She made us care what happened to her. Now we care how her last story ends.
dhinckley@nydailynews.com
