Exuding icy malevolence as Number Two in Austin Powers. (© NEW LINE CINEMA. A TIME WARNER COMPANY. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)
I never saw Natalie dead, not at the morgue, not at the funeral home. I wanted to remember her alive.
The Splendour was impounded, pending an investigation. The autopsy revealed that Natalie had an alcohol level of .14, slightly above the .10 level of intoxication for California. The coroner estimated it as the equivalent of seven or eight glasses of wine, which sounds about right. She also had taken a seasickness drug and some Darvon, but no sleeping pills.
There was a heavy bruise on her right arm, a small one on her left wrist, small ones on her legs, her left knee, and right ankle, and an abrasion on her left cheek.
I’ve had several decades to think about what happened. My conclusion, as well as that of the people who were there and of Frank Westmore, who wasn’t there but who knew the boat and Natalie, is this: while Walken and I were on the deck hashing out our argument, Natalie was in the master cabin and heard the dinghy banging against the side. She got up to retie it. She slipped on the swim step on the stern, hit the step on the way down, and was either stunned or knocked unconscious and rolled into the water. The loose dinghy floated away.
Some people said she was trying to get in the dinghy and drive away from the argument Chris and I were having, but she had gotten in and out of that dinghy a thousand times. She knew that getting in and out of the Valiant was very tricky in rough water because the swim step was slippery when it was wet. Even if the water was calm, one person usually held the line to keep the dinghy close to the Splendour while the other person hopped in. To do it in rough water in the dark was more than tricky; it was dangerous. Besides that, the state of the controls when they found the dinghy proved that she had never actually gotten into the boat.
Likewise, if she had hold of the dinghy’s tether line, or if she was conscious while she was in the water, she would certainly have screamed or yelled and we would have heard her. My theory fits the few facts we have.
But it’s all conjecture. Nobody knows. There are only two possibilities: either she was trying to get away from the argument, or she was trying to tie the dinghy. But the bottom line is that nobody knows exactly what happened.
Natalie’s body was taken straight to the morgue. I called Mart Crowley and told him that Natalie was dead and asked him to pick me up at the Santa Monica airport. When I got off the helicopter from Catalina, I went directly to psychiatrist Arthur Malin, who told me how to break the news to the children.
“Don’t ever minimize it,” he said. “Don’t try to make it accessible. This is a terrible thing that has happened, it has happened to all of you, and you will have to deal with it together.”
I went to the house, where our core group of friends had already gathered: Roddy McDowall, my son Josh, Linda Foreman, Guy McElwaine, Tom Mankiewicz, Paula Prentiss, Judy Scott-Fox, Liz Applegate, Delphine Mann, and Bill Broder. Dr. Paul Rudnick, my general physician, was there, as was Arthur Malin, who offered to give me something to calm me down, but I didn’t think that was a good idea; I needed to be completely there for our kids.
Natasha, Katie, and Courtney came down the stairs. “I’ve got something terrible to tell you,” I began, “but I want you to know that we’re going to be all right, and we’re going to stay together.” And then I told them their mother had died. Unfortunately, they had already heard about it on television. We cried and held each other. Our lawyer, Paul Ziffren, came and wouldn’t leave. “Promise me one thing,” Paul said. “I will not leave this house until you promise me this. Whatever is written, whatever is said, do not answer any questions from the media. Do not respond to anything. None of that is important. All that is important is you and your family. Promise me this.”
I promised, and I’m glad I did; Paul had just given me very sound advice. For the rest of it, that day and that night I held the children while they cried, and Josh held me while I cried.
Throughout that long, terrible night off Catalina and the next few days, Chris Walken was there. He was at the house as people started coming by, and he stayed through the funeral. He went back to New York afterward. When all the shit came down and people made outrageous claims to the scandal sheets, he never said a word, never made a statement that added fuel to the fire.
I hold no grudge against him; he was a gentleman who behaved honorably in an impossible situation.
I was in a zombie state. It was as if there were a dark film over my eyes; I looked but I didn’t see. I was there for the kids, but otherwise I was going through the motions. The police came a couple of times and asked a lot of questions, which I answered as best I could. There were a lot of people hanging around to make sure that I wasn’t going to go off the deep end, which I would never have done. I may not have known much at that point, but I would never have committed suicide; I knew I had to take care of my kids. They needed their father; their father needed them.
Late on December 1, I came downstairs for a while. Mart Crowley was there, Josh Donen, a few others. The doorbell rang, and Elizabeth Taylor came in. She had just finished a performance of The Little Foxes at the Ahmanson. We held each other. “Oh, baby, baby,” she said. “What happened to us, baby?”
Fred Astaire was there, and Gene Kelly came every day. Gene understood loss—his beloved wife, Jeanne Coyne, had died of cancer. He was a solid force, an unshakable wall of support; he would hold me and say, “We’ll get through this.” David Niven was making a film in Europe, but he was on the phone to me every day, talking me through it.
Cumulatively, these friends and my children saved my life.
The funeral itself remains a blur. Natalie’s death was an enormous story all over the world, and when a tragedy like this occurs and there are no facts, or the facts are inconveniently bland, the vacuum is filled with inaccuracies or suppositions. The least offensive was that Natalie’s death made her the latest victim of a jinx on all who had made Rebel Without a Cause. The press had completely staked out 603 Canon Drive. We were besieged. When we left for the funeral, publicist Warren Cowan said the kids and I could go out the back way, but I said, “We’re not going out the back door to their mother’s funeral. We’re going out the front door.”
So we went to the cemetery, where we were surrounded by loving and caring friends. There was balalaika music, and all the people Natalie loved were there: Frank Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor, Fred Astaire, Rock Hudson, Greg Peck, Gene Kelly, and Elia Kazan. Larry Olivier wanted to come, but his doctors wouldn’t let him. Richard Gregson flew in and offered his unconditional support. Hope Lange, Roddy McDowall, and Tommy Thompson delivered the eulogies. Natalie’s pallbearers were Howard Jeffrey, Mart Crowley, Josh and Peter Donen, John Foreman, Guy McElwaine, Tom Mankiewicz, and Paul Ziffren. We had the service, and then we walked out and buried Natalie.
I had chosen Westwood Cemetery because it was close to the house and the kids. They could go and visit whenever they wanted. I was trying to make it as right as I could for the children. I distinctly remember buying a double plot, but the cemetery contended that I didn’t, and they lost the records. Years later, they offered to exhume Natalie and move her to another spot where we could be buried together, but I didn’t want to do that. I just let it go.
After the funeral, we all went back to the house for a wake. President Reagan and Nancy called, and Queen Elizabeth sent a telegram: “On behalf of the Crown and the Commonwealth of Great Britain, I send heartfelt condolences to the family and friends of Mrs. Wagner. The tragic loss of great persons is felt the world over. However, loving memories of Mrs. Wagner will live with us always.” Princess Margaret and Pierre Trudeau also sent telegrams.
It was at this point that I went to bed and stayed there. It may have been for seven days, it may have been for eight. I was catatonic and don’t really remember. I didn’t shower and I didn’t shave. I don’t know if I was in some form of catastrophic mourning; I don’t know if I was in the midst of a contained nervous breakdown. I only know that I was obsessively, continually trying to understand what had happened—to figure out if there was anything I could have done that I didn’t do. It all went round and round in my head, and for those seven or eight days I couldn’t face anything that constituted the world. We had had everything, and our lives had been on an upswing ever since we remarried. To lose Natalie to an incongruous accident fueled by too much alcohol seemed more than tragic—it felt impossible.
Grief mixed with shock is such a difficult state to be in; it’s hard to even describe it. On the one hand, I was numb and felt like I was in some sort of dream state—I couldn’t believe Natalie was gone, but I knew it was true. And despite the shock, which makes you feel like you’re muffled in cotton, my nerve ends were screaming. I was in emotional pain so intense it was physical.
Did I blame myself? If I had been there, I could have done something. But I wasn’t there. I didn’t see her. The door was closed; I thought she was belowdecks. I didn’t hear anything. But ultimately, a man is responsible for his loved one, and she was my loved one.
Yes, I blamed myself. Natalie would have felt the same way had it happened to me. Why wasn’t I there? Why wasn’t I watching? I would have done anything in the world to make her life better or protect her. Anything. I would have given my life for hers, because that’s the way we were.
She was my love. She was the woman who had defined my emotional life, both by her presence and her absence, and now she was gone and this time there was no getting her back.
Finally, Willie Mae, the children’s nurse, came in and said, “Mr. W., you have got to get up! You have to get these kids to school! You have got to go back to work!” That was the moment that finally penetrated the fog. I got out of bed, got into the shower, and made myself presentable. And then Natasha and Courtney and I went for a walk in the garden, and I told them that it was going to be all right. They had lost their mother; they had to know that they weren’t going to lose their father as well. That was the beginning of my return to the land of the living, and for that I have to thank Willie Mae. We all have saviors in our lives, and she was one of them.
And there was another thing. A doctor gave me a line from Eugene O’Neill: “Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.” For me, my children and the people who threw themselves into holding us together were the glue.
It was a strange, disorienting time, filled with strange, disorienting events. In the following weeks, women—famous women—began showing up at my house uninvited. It was soon after Natalie died, and women I had known for years were suddenly bringing food by the house and effecting concern, which I didn’t believe for a minute—they weren’t exactly dressing like they were in mourning. It was such a disconcerting display, and it added a level of discomfort I didn’t really need in my life at that point, this idea that I would be in the market days after my wife died. It was so disrespectful of our relationship and of my love for her.
Nine days after Natalie died, I went back to work on Hart to Hart. I had lost ten pounds and most of my emotional equilibrium. Stefanie Powers was in only marginally better shape than I was, but she shepherded me through it. She never let me out of her sight, and if I blew my lines or got upset, she smoothed everything over. On December 12, the police concluded that Natalie’s death was a tragic accident, and the case was closed.
Before that happened, Thomas Noguchi, the Los Angeles coroner, got into the act and ventured some ridiculous speculations, just as he had with Bill Holden, and as he would when he reopened the investigation into the death of Marilyn Monroe. Noguchi was a camera-hog who felt that he had to stoke the publicity fire in order to maintain the level of attention he’d gotten used to. Noguchi particularly enraged Frank Sinatra, who knew the truth and, in any case, would never have allowed anybody who harmed Natalie to survive.
It was after the final determination of Natalie’s cause of death that David Niven came to my—our—rescue. He insisted we get out of Los Angeles for Christmas and come to Europe. I took the kids, Willie Mae, and Delphine Mann, Courtney’s godmother, to Gstaad, where David waited for us for four hours in a blizzard. When we finally got there, he held me in his arms, and then he drove us to a chalet he had rented.
No man could have had a better friend. He had been where I was; he had lost Primmie in a similarly stupid accident, and he had raised their two boys in spite of Hjordis, not with her.
Through the next several weeks, he was with me every day. Every day. He never left me alone. He would take me for long walks and talk to me about what I was going through and what he had gone through. He gave me the benefit of the wisdom he had gained from being in the same situation. He told me that this was going to be an incremental process; it was not something you got over, he told me. It was something you learned to live with.
“Don’t make any hard-and-fast decisions,” he said. “Let your feelings go where they want, and don’t let anybody else intrude or tell you what’s appropriate or inappropriate.” David’s wise counsel, and getting away from Hollywood, gave me some distance and enabled me to begin to get my bearings. Those weeks with David were the beginning of the long process by which I put my life back together.
Looking back, I can see that it took years until the haze lifted. What I came to realize, gradually, incrementally, was that Natalie had a tragic death, but she didn’t have a tragic life. She lived more in her forty-three years than most people—felt more, experienced more, did more, gave more. She was loved, fulfilled, and worshiped; she caught her rainbows. The way a life ends doesn’t define that life; the way a life is lived does.
Even though Natalie has been dead for more than twenty-five years, there are still unexpectedly painful moments, like a loose floorboard that snaps up and hits you in the face. Life does have to go on, and with the children I couldn’t be so overcome by it that I couldn’t keep their spirits up. And they were so very helpful to me, because they were getting hit by the same floorboards I was. Katie, the oldest, stepped up and took something of a maternal position with her sisters, which helped. The fact that we all held on to each other and kept going—Natalie would have wanted that. And the way the children have handled themselves in their lives, their strength, fills me with such pride. Natalie raised our children well.
On the way back from Gstaad, we took a New Year’s stopover in Wales, where Richard Gregson was living with his wife. Then it was back to Los Angeles and work. The Hart to Hart crew was so respectful and caring, and it felt good to be back, to feel the warmth of the lights on my face.
Over the years, I would have epic legal battles with Aaron Spelling and Leonard Goldberg, almost always about money due me that they refused to acknowledge was due me and that they had to end up paying me.
But.
In the worst days of my life, when I needed Aaron and Leonard, really needed them, they were there for me. Anything I needed was customized for me; if the production schedule had to be rearranged, then it was rearranged. If that cost them money, they didn’t utter a word of criticism. They were solicitous, they called, they bent whatever needed bending to enable me to function, and I will always be indebted to them for that.
Likewise, Stefanie was continually marvelous; she knew only too well what I was going through. Bill Holden’s death was devastating for her, and I’m sure there was much attendant guilt. There was a sense in which Stefanie and I were united by far more than working on a TV show; we were united in a shared grief.
The fallout went on for months…years. The Ahmanson Theater chose not to try to recast the production of Anastasia and canceled it. As for the incomplete Brainstorm, MGM tried to use Natalie’s death as an excuse to make an insurance claim and scrap the picture. The studio lost the case, and after some rewriting to give Natalie’s scenes to another character, the film was finally released in late 1983. Unlike the last films of other great stars, which often serve as a sort of summing up of their gifts and their meaning, Brainstorm was completely unworthy of Natalie. It wasn’t successful, and it didn’t deserve to be. If it hadn’t been Natalie’s last picture, nobody would remember it at all.
Natalie’s will didn’t leave her sister Lana any money, just her clothes. A few days after I went back to work on Hart to Hart, Lana called the house and said she wanted her inheritance. Liz, Natalie’s secretary, explained that the will hadn’t been probated yet, but Lana kept calling and demanding her property, which included some fur coats that were particularly valuable. I wanted Natasha and Courtney to have those, so I told Liz to have the coats appraised and I would send Lana the money. The coats were appraised at $11,000, so I sent Lana a check for that amount and told her she could have everything else.
Damned if Lana didn’t take me literally. She pulled up in a truck and proceeded to strip Natalie’s walk-in closet down to the walls. She even took the underwear. The clothes ended up on sale in a store on Ventura Boulevard that dealt in secondhand clothing. Lana then promptly rushed to write a ridiculous book about her sister that was published a year after Natalie died. Her writing career went about as well as her acting career.
At least she was consistent.
Once some order was restored to our lives, my first priority was to keep my girls together. Courtney was very young and completely shattered, as only a young girl who has lost her mother can be. One of the problems that Courtney has carried with her through the years is that she didn’t know her mother that well. When something tragic happens, people go out of their way not to bring it up to the people involved because they know how painful it is. So Courtney didn’t talk with me or with anybody else very much about her mother; she buried a lot of those feelings, as did Natasha.
Natalie had custody of Natasha after her divorce from Richard Gregson, and the girls had become totally devoted to each other. Although Richard would certainly have been within his rights to ask for Natasha, I asked him if I could keep her with me so I could raise her and Courtney together. “The last thing those girls need,” I told him, “is to be separated from each other.” Thankfully, Richard agreed absolutely, so we raised the girls together, and very amicably. He could have Natasha for visits anytime he wanted, but her main residence was with me. Because of Richard’s decency, there were no more losses piled on top of what had already happened.
I’ve always believed that there’s a lot to be said for going back to the land, so soon after Natalie died I bought eighty acres from Richard Widmark in Hidden Valley. Dick held on to a large property next door, so we were gentleman ranchers together. With the help of a great old cowboy named Tom Ulmer, we raised cutting horses and grew hay. It was a working ranch, and I was out there on the weekends riding and running the tractor. We had five mares that produced five foals a year and fifty head of cattle that produced another fifty head—not enough to make any money, but enough to compel hard work and force me to work amid the natural cycle of life. I had had enough death, so I made up my mind that none of my animals would go out the door to the slaughterhouse; we sold them strictly as breeding stock.
I had every intention of holding on to the ranch, but one day a guy showed up unannounced and offered to buy it at any price I cared to name. I named a price, he nodded, and the deal was done. I took some of the money and turned around and bought another ranch, this one encompassing 184 acres. In retrospect, I believe the Hidden Valley ranch was a crucial component of my healing.
On Sunday, July 11, 1982, nine days before Natalie’s birthday, my mother wrote me a letter:
Dear RJ,
You are very much in my thoughts and prayers as I know this is a sad time for you with Natalie’s birthday and an anniversary just ahead—but although it’s hard to do—you must tuck these days away and only have happy memories—these you will always have—yours alone.
Have no regrets, RJ, as there was no one who loved their wife, children and home more than you did—and you were always so in tune together and you were so good to Natalie, so do not have any unhappy moments.
Natalie had a very full life for her age—much more than many actresses ever achieve at a much older age. She had a happy home life—beautiful children and a husband who adored her—so what more is there in life?
I feel very sad that she was taken at such a young time in her life, but there are things one has no control over—[so] remember only all the happy times you had together.
I love you dearly, RJ, always and always will until the end of time.
Love,
C.
Thank God for Hart to Hart. The show kept going, although it always gets harder the longer a show runs. The writers get bored and want to move on to something else because the characters are set. Besides that, relationships are the toughest things to write for television—or, for that matter, for any media. The nature of our show meant that we couldn’t spice things up by inventing domestic squabbles or kitchen-sink drama. But it was a wonderful company; Tom Mankiewicz and Mart Crowley ran the show and did a wonderful job, and the entire cast and crew were a pleasure to work with. The fact that we were a success meant that we were always able to get good actors, which keeps the regulars on their toes.
After our fifth season, our ratings were still good, and we had eight scripts ready for our sixth season. We were going to take the Harts to France, then shoot a couple more episodes in other European spots. And then a new regime at ABC canceled us because they wanted to make room for their own programming.
We were all totally shocked; Aaron and Leonard came out to the house while we tried to figure out a way to keep things going. The problem was that the network canceled us very late, and the other networks had already set their schedules. Today a show that was as successful as ours would be easily moved over to cable or one of the other networks, but in 1984 those alternative venues didn’t exist.
Once again, I was an actor at liberty.
I had always promised Natalie that if anything happened to her, I would take care of her mother, which I did. At first, Mud handled my fan mail and would come by the house to see her granddaughters. I bought the condo that Natalie had been renting for her and gave Mud $2,000 a month for her expenses. But it was gradually growing apparent that she was getting a touch forgetful and could no longer live alone.
Lana moved in with Mud and brought her boyfriend with her. Lana and her boyfriend were in the big bedroom, and Mud was in the small bedroom, and in between were about ten cats. (Lana has always been an animal collector.) The neighbors finally demanded that we do something about the smell. The drapes were shredded from the cats, there were droppings everywhere, and rolls of toilet paper littered the floors. Basically, they were living like derelicts.
We moved Mud into her own apartment at Barrington Plaza, and we cleaned the old place up. For a time, Katie lived there. Then I got a call that Mud had set fire to her apartment. When we asked her what had happened, she said that she had been looking for her jewels under the bed with a lighted candle.
It was clear that Mud required constant supervision and needed to go to the Motion Picture Home, which, since it began in the 1920s, has provided a wonderful, nurturing refuge for elderly people from all branches of the industry. I called up Edie Wasserman to arrange it. Natalie and I had raised a great deal of money for the Home over the years, and I’ve continued to do so. Arranging residency for Mud would have been very easy.
But Lana didn’t want her mother to go to the Home, largely, I believe, because if Mud lived with her, she could live off Mud’s Social Security and my monthly check. Olga, Natalie’s older sister, is a wonderful woman and was very much on my side in this entire unfortunate business. Olga and I tried to pry Mud away and get her into the Home, but without Lana’s permission Mud couldn’t be admitted. It wasn’t long before Mud’s carelessness accelerated into dementia, and she had to be moved to a hospital. She died in January 1998, a month before she would have turned eighty-six.
About two years ago, I received a letter from Lana’s daughter asking for help for her child—Lana’s grandchild.
As I sat there thinking, I remembered how her husband at the time sold the pictures of mine and Natalie’s second wedding to the tabloids. I remembered all the misleading stories about Natalie she gave to the tabloids. I remembered how she ran up her mother’s credit cards. I remembered the way she ransacked Natalie’s clothes. And I remembered the last time I had given her money. She had come to me for help with her house and the water bill and so forth. I had given her a check for $25,000. A month later she was back for more.
I remembered all this, and I said no. To paraphrase Walter Huston in Dodsworth, “Family has to stop somewhere short of suicide.”
Then Lana appealed to the kids, and Natasha gave her some money. “It will never be enough,” I told her.
We stored all the paraphernalia from the Splendour in a facility in the valley. There was a great deal of memorabilia—wonderful photographs that we’d had framed and mounted, all the silver and china and clocks and barometers from the boat. In 1994 the Northridge earthquake hit, and a bridge collapsed onto the storage facility. There was nothing left. A bulldozer came in and loaded the shards onto a truck. Everything was carted away to a landfill.
Gone, all gone.