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SURVIVING THE PANDEMIC: Did Natalie Wood drown in an accident, or was she….?
By
Published: May 04, 2020
Category:
Pandemic: Dispatches and Essentials
The death of Natalie Wood in forever ago 1981 seems so unimportant today that my typing about it and your reading about it — the word is “indulgence.” But HBO is rolling out a documentary about her tomorrow: “NATALIE WOOD: WHAT REMAINS BEHIND” (May 5, Tuesday: (9:00 -10:40 pm ET/PT) and HBO On Demand, HBO NOW, HBO GO. And the news continues to be dispiriting. So… let’s spend a few minutes addressing a story that has more secrets than Melania Trump.
In this corner… Natasha Gregson Wagner, Natalie’s daughter, the producer of the HBO documentary, and the author of a new book, “More Than Love: An Intimate Portrait of My Mother, Natalie Wood.” [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
She says: “I feel that this documentary is the definitive documentary of her life, and my book is the definitive deep dive into our relationship, but I also talk about the night she died and the sheriff’s department reopening the case. I get into that in the book as well. I just think this narrative of fiction that has been peddled… it’s time for that to stop now.”
In the very opposite corner… Suzanne Finstad, author of the just-revised “Natalie Wood: The Complete Biography”. Finstad, a former lawyer, interviewed 400 people for her book. [To read an excerpt, click here. To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
The controversy:
Thirty years after Natalie Wood’s death, the L.A. Sheriff’s Department reopened the investigation into her drowning using Finstad’s groundbreaking research and chilling, hour-by-hour timeline of that tumultuous weekend as evidence. Within a year, the L.A. Coroner changed Natalie Wood’s death certificate from “Accidental Drowning” to “Drowning and Other Undetermined Factors.” In 2018, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department officially named Wagner a “Person of Interest” in Wood’s death.
Finstad presents a very different Natalie Wood from the Hollywood darling of legend:
Family violence. An alcoholic father. A pathological attachment to her Svengali stage mother. Psychological abuse as a child star. Paranoias. Phobias. A bedroom of storybook dolls she believed were alive and spoke to her. Pimped at 15 to Frank Sinatra. Forced to return an engagement ring to her high school sweetheart, who tried to kill himself afterward. Exploited into a sexual liaison as a teenager with 42-year-old director Nicholas Ray to prove that she could play a “bad” girl in “Rebel Without a Cause.”
And — no surprise — she presents a very different R.J. Wagner.
If you want a diversion, here are 592 pages and a movie.
TODAY’S POEM
Jack Gilbert, “Failing and Flying”
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.
ESSENTIALS AND DISPATCHES
Everything, all in one place.
UPDATE: EO Hand Soap is available again.
UPDATE: I spoke with a NYC lung specialist. He endorses Vitamin D, but warns you not to double/triple dose. In large doses, Vitamin D becomes toxic.
