Natalie, 1960. (PHOTOGRAPH BY ERNST HAAS/ERNST HAAS/GETTY IMAGES)
Throughout our marriage, Catalina Island had been a large part of our lives. As I’ve mentioned, I had spent a lot of time there as a kid playing baseball with John Ford and his crew. When Natalie and I got together, she joined me in my devotion to the island. For the Thanksgiving weekend of 1981, we decided to take the Splendour out to Catalina. We invited Chris Walken, Delphine Mann, and another couple to be our guests, but the couple and Delphine had to cancel.
On Friday morning, November 27, we picked Walken up at Marina Del Rey, where our boat was docked, and made the twenty-two-mile voyage to Catalina. We anchored Splendour offshore from Avalon in the afternoon. A couple of hours later, we took the Valiant to the island, where we did some shopping. Then we went to a place we liked called the El Galleon and had margaritas and beer chasers. I found Chris Walken to be an interesting, pleasant man, and there was certainly nothing remarkable in the atmosphere.
Around nine o’clock we headed back to the boat, but Natalie was worried about the water, which had developed a swell. As always, Natalie was comfortable on the boat itself, but she didn’t like being in the water, or the possibility of being in the water, because she was a bad swimmer. She finally agreed to go back to Catalina on the dinghy, and we had some more drinks over dinner.
By this time we had had slightly too much to drink, and things were getting combative. When I suggested moving the Splendour closer to shore to avoid having to ride out the swells, Natalie gave me an argument, and I gave her an argument right back. She got angry and told Dennis Davern, who took care of the Splendour for us, to take her to Avalon in the dinghy. She spent the night at the Pavilion Lodge. Chris just shrugged and went below to his cabin. I secured the boat and went to sleep myself.
The next morning Natalie came back to the boat and everything was fine. She cooked breakfast for Walken and me on the Splendour, and I again suggested moving the boat to calmer waters. This time she had no problem with it. By 1:00 P.M., we were anchored offshore at the Isthmus Cove, on the northern end of the island, which is far more isolated than the southern end.
A little while after that, everybody took a nap. When I woke up, I found a note from Natalie saying that she and Chris had taken the dinghy and gone to the island. They went to Doug’s Harbor Reef for about two hours. I wasn’t angry, but I was agitated. I called the shore boat and joined them. It would be fair to say that I was upset, but not so much that I let on. We stayed at Doug’s for dinner, finally leaving for the Splendour around ten o’clock.
Again, we had had quite a bit of wine with dinner, but I would categorize our condition as tipsy; certainly, nobody was anywhere near drunk. We got back to the salon of the Splendour and had some more drinks. And it was at that point that I got pissed off.
Chris began talking about his “total pursuit of a career,” which he admitted was more important to him than his personal life. He clearly thought that Natalie should live like that too, which rather neatly overlooked the fact that she was the mother of three small children. He also said it was obvious that I didn’t share his point of view, which was an understatement.
I finally had had enough. “Why the fuck don’t you stay out of her career?” I said. “She’s got enough people telling her what to do without you.” Walken and I got into an argument. At one point I picked up a wine bottle, slammed it on the table, and broke it into pieces. Natalie was already belowdecks at that point. She had gotten up during our argument—she didn’t rush out, she just got up—and went down the three steps from the salon of the boat to the master cabin to go to the bathroom. The last time I saw my wife she was fixing her hair at a little vanity in the bathroom while I was arguing with Chris Walken. I saw her shut the door. She was going to bed.
By the nature of the disagreement, it was a circular argument, and the fact that neither of us was feeling any pain made it harder to break the circle. About fifteen minutes after Natalie closed the door, Chris and I moved from the salon up the three steps that led out onto the deck. If I had to categorize the emotional temperature, I would say that things were threatening to get physical, but the fact is that they never did.
After some minutes on the deck, the fresh air helped us calm down, and we came back into the salon and sat there for a while, but not long. At this point, everything was fine between us. Then Chris went to bed. I sat up for a while with Dennis Davern. And then it was time to go to bed.
I went below, and Natalie wasn’t there. Strange. I went back up on deck and looked around for her and noticed the dinghy was gone. Stranger. I remember wondering if she’d taken the dinghy because of the argument, and then I thought, No way, because she was terrified of dark water, and besides that, the dinghy fired up very loudly, and we would have heard it, whether we were in the salon or on deck.
On the other hand, if she wasn’t on the Splendour, where else could she be except on the dinghy? I found Dennis Davern and said, “I think Natalie took off on the dinghy.” At that point, I thought she had gone back to Doug’s Harbor Reef, the restaurant where we had had dinner.
I radioed for the shore boat and went back to the restaurant. Christopher and Dennis stayed on the Splendour. When I got to the island, the restaurant was closed. Natalie wasn’t anywhere around the dock area, nor was the dinghy.
By this time, it was about 1:30 A.M. on the morning of November 29, and I was scared and confused. Dennis radioed for help on the Harbor Channel, which is monitored by the Bay Watch, a sort of private coast patrol. Then I called the Coast Guard. The Coast Guard came out to the boat, and they went through the Splendour from top to bottom, from the bilge on up. They checked everything. Then they started search and rescue, which is very difficult at night, crisscrossing the ocean surface with searchlights from Coast Guard helicopters. Hour after hour—nothing.
So we sat there through the night, in the salon, waiting to hear what happened. Chris Walken was there, Dennis Davern was there. Once in a while one of us would go to the bathroom, but there wasn’t much conversation because the only possible subject was Natalie and nobody knew anything.
I kept running the possibilities through my mind, and there weren’t many. She could have taken the dinghy to a cove someplace and the engine could have gone dead. But why hadn’t any of us heard the engine start? As for the other possibility, I knew what it was, but I didn’t allow myself to contemplate it. Aft, there was one step down to the dinghy, the only way on or off the boat when you were at sea. This step, which we called the swim step, was near the water line and could be very slippery.
In the morning, about 5:30 A.M., they found the Valiant in an isolated cove beyond Blue Cavern Point. The key was in the off position, the gear was in neutral, and the oars were fastened to the side. They radioed and told us that they had the dinghy, but Natalie wasn’t on it. We had just run out of options, but I didn’t allow myself to actually contemplate what that meant—it was too unthinkable.
Two hours later, they found my wife. Natalie was wearing a down-filled red parka Windbreaker, and that helped them spot her. The harbor master, Doug Bombard, was the one who got her out of the water, and he was the one who came onto the Splendour and looked at me.
I remember that the morning was sunny. I remember that I was standing on the aft deck when Doug pulled up and got out of his boat.
“Where is she?” I asked him.
Doug looked at me. “She’s dead, RJ.”
My knees went out; everything went away from me. Soon afterward, a helicopter came and took us to the mainland.
So many of the best times of my life had been spent in and around Catalina Island. It was always one of my favorite places on earth.
From the day Natalie died to this, I have never gone back.