Chapter 9
Courtney and Natasha, early 1980s.
After the funeral, Daddy Gregson and Julia went back to England. The troops of mourners, flowers, and telegrams that had been filling our house dwindled. Soon the paparazzi outside the front gates were the only ones left. The press clearly had no intention of leaving us alone.
Before long, most of my mom’s rules were put back in place—except for some reason the TV was allowed to remain in my room. I felt a sharp pang of guilt every time I turned it on. Things were supposed to return to normal. But how could we go back to normal when normal no longer existed? It was like living in a house that had been struck by a meteor, and we were expected to walk past the gaping hole in the ceiling and step around the smoking boulder on the floor as if they were part of the decor.
At least my dad was finally out of bed. Nine days after my mom died, he went back to work. He was needed on the set of Hart to Hart. Two weeks prior to my mom’s death, Stefanie Powers’s significant other, the actor William Holden, had died in his home after drinking too much and falling, injuring his head. I remember the seriousness in my dad’s tone when he told us that Stefanie’s boyfriend, Bill, had died. Stefanie was still in the throes of her early mourning when my dad lost my mom. They were already close, but their shared grief deepened their friendship.
The same Monday morning my dad returned to work, I went back to school. My best friends Jessica, Tracey, and Caprice formed a protective force field around me, taking it upon themselves to make sure I was okay. My teachers were very kind to me—the expressions on their faces a mixture of pity and sympathy—but I was embarrassed that so much of the focus was on me.
Before my return to fifth grade, the Curtis School held some kind of assembly to break the news to my fellow students and to encourage them to be respectful. Even so, there were stares and whispers as I moved through the halls and classrooms. Some kids made bad jokes. “What kind of wood doesn’t float?” was a popular one, the punch line, of course, being my mother’s name. I had avoided hearing about her drowning from the TV news as much as possible, but I couldn’t avoid the murmuring behind my back. I assumed it was happening because my parents were famous and my mom had drowned at night. I wasn’t old enough to understand why people gossiped. I just knew that everyone was interested in my life and I hated that feeling. I pretended I was fine, smiled a lot, and pushed the intense feeling of longing for my mother aside until nightfall, when I would cry for her in my bed, my stuffed animals absorbing my tears.
Nothing was right. Mommie had been our wizard and fairy godmother. She was our everything. Without her, all the color and sunshine seemed to have gone out of our home. The curtains stayed open, and yet it was as if they were pulled closed, leaving the house in shadow. The house was quiet in a way it had never been in the past. It had become a place where people cried and spoke in whispers.
On December 12, once the autopsy was complete, the coroner, Thomas Noguchi, and the lead Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department detective, Duane Rasure, concluded that my mother’s death had been an accident, without any evidence of foul play. They surmised that she had gone down to the dinghy and then likely missed a step, slipping and falling into the water, and that the bruises on her face and body were consistent with this sequence of events. The case was officially closed.
We all knew my mother often got annoyed if the dinghy wasn’t tied down tightly. If the wind picked up and the sea became rough, it would bang right up against where her head rested in her bed. She was a light sleeper and she hated noises. She was also a feisty woman—our trusty first mate—who didn’t need a man to do things for her. It was so like her to get up in her nightgown and socks to go tie down the dinghy herself. At home she often ran downstairs in her nightie to investigate if she heard anything that disturbed her, not wanting to wake up my dad if he was asleep.
The swim step that led to the dinghy was wet and slippery, and she had had too much to drink. If she lost her footing and fell into the water, how could anyone have heard her struggling? They were all inside the boat. She was wearing a heavy down coat that absorbed the seawater and would have quickly dragged her under before she could hoist herself out. She was not a strong swimmer. It was November, and the water that night would have been cold.
But we could only guess at these details. No one knew for certain. My mother had been alone that night. For my part, I didn’t want to think about the details of her death at all. It was too painful. I didn’t care how she died. I just cared that she died. I put up a wall against analyzing or discussing it with anyone. It was too devastating, too horrific for me to picture her drowning alone at night in the dark, cold water. I didn’t see the point in dwelling on those thoughts. After all, she was gone, and that was all that mattered.
My mom dying confirmed all my worst fears. I had been in therapy for more than a year to overcome my terror that she was going to die. Now I should have been able to put all my ridiculous good-luck rituals to rest. Instead, what happened only confirmed that I had been right to be terrified. I should have performed even more rituals, not fewer. Obviously, I hadn’t done enough and this was why she had died. What if, like my grandmother, I really did have some sort of sixth sense about things? Was this why I had obsessed over the thought that my mom was going to die? If I foresaw it, did that mean it was partly my fault for not preventing it? In my grief-stricken, eleven-year-old mind, I managed to convince myself that my mother’s death had somehow been my fault.
I became more frightened, anxious to the point of hypervigilance, on high alert for the slightest bad omen. I doubled down on my nightly rituals, lining up my stuffed toys with newfound meticulousness. I had gotten my hair cut on Saturday morning, November 28. I was never getting my hair cut on a Saturday again. Anything I did that weekend, I never wanted to do again, including waking up to the sound of the radio. To this day, I do not fall asleep with a TV or radio on. I can’t trust them.
I wanted to find a way to stay in touch with my mother. My grandmother, firmly believing herself to be psychic, was happy to help me. We began holding séances in my parents’ linen closet, with Courtney also in attendance. The closet was warm and dark, with just enough room for the three of us to sit comfortably on the floor, the neatly folded linens and towels lined up on shelves all around us. Baba lit a candle, then we closed our eyes and held hands as she tried to reach our mom and Deda. The bottom shelves in the closet were covered in a soft white plastic, and I remember picking nervously at the material in the dark, as Baba commanded the spirits in hushed, dramatic tones. My dad and Kilky obviously didn’t know these séances were happening or they would have been furious. This couldn’t have been a healthy way for children to handle a parent’s death. But Baba was always a mystic.
I began to wonder if I was a mystic too. Each night, I lay in bed and asked my mother to show a sign that she could hear me. One school night, a week or two after she died, Jessica was sleeping over and Liz was telling us one of her made-up stories about Billy Mouse and Morris Gerbil. She was just about to turn out the lights when I asked my mom out loud if she could send me a sign. Suddenly all the lights outside flashed on and off. Jessica, Liz, and I held our breath and then I started to cry.
“It’s okay, lovey,” Liz told me, trying to comfort me. “That means Mummy heard you. She is with you all the time.”
I was stunned and a little scared that my request had so much power, but at the same time, it devastated me because it made her death feel all the more final. Another time, I held a séance on my own in the closet with my bird Smokey. I turned the lights out and asked my mom to make Smokey chirp if she heard me. He did. Again, I wasn’t comforted. Instead, I was terrified of this new world without my mom in it.
We had been a famous family that everybody admired and now the worst thing imaginable had befallen us and everyone knew it. I’d be carrying my books across the school grounds or shopping at the mall, and people would point their fingers in my direction and mutter, “That’s Natasha Gregson Wagner,” adding, “Natalie Wood’s daughter.” I had never been pitied before. I had always been so proud to be my mother’s daughter, but now the association filled me with embarrassment and regret. In public, I wished to be anyone but Natalie Wood’s daughter. If only I could just be some anonymous girl—normal, safe, and unremarkable. In private, I felt small and lonely.
Sometimes after school Courtney and I would go with Kilky to our neighborhood market, Food King. Kilky was friendly with all the baggers and checkout people but I felt embarrassed when they looked at Courtney and me—seeing the pity in their eyes. Then just as I would look down or away in shame and dismay, there next to the checkout counter would be the National Enquirer. Inevitably, my mom and my dad would be on the cover, with a headline about her death, some new “revelation”: that my mom was drunk that night, that she was allegedly having an affair with Chris Walken, that my parents had been fighting. I’d grown up with celebrity parents—I understood not to believe a single word printed on the cover of a tabloid. But it still hurt. In the checkout line, I tried to turn away, to block out the words and the images, but I was getting the message that there was no safe place for me these days. Home was filled with memories of my mom, and the outside world was filled with people pitying us or judging us with accusing headlines.
I spoke more and more quietly, hoping to disappear. In school I never raised my hand or volunteered to answer questions. I participated as little as possible. I think I was afraid that if I opened my mouth to talk, the tears would overwhelm me. I tried to learn, but I couldn’t really concentrate on my studies because my heart hurt too much. I failed algebra and geometry and had to take them again in summer school.
Without my mother as my mirror, I started to see myself in a new light. I had been so assured of my mother’s approval that I could be a bit of a bossy girl. Katie had called me a spoiled brat, and maybe she was right. I was a pampered little princess who grew up believing I was fragile. But now the worst possible catastrophe had happened. Did that mean I was cursed? Not a princess anymore? I felt more like a paper princess torn apart and pasted back together—a sham.
I played our last moments together over and over in my head. I could hear my mother’s voice telling me there was nothing to worry about. I remember how she said my nickname in her special way, “Natooshie.” My mom promised she would come back and I had believed her. She didn’t lie to me, and yet and yet…
That one last gardenia-scented hug with her, in her soft angora sweater. I’d had no way of knowing it would be our last moment.
I was so worried Daddy Wagner would be next. I begged him not to go out for dinner. I called him on the set of Hart to Hart to make sure he was safe. I burst into tears whenever he left me. When I said my nightly prayers I pleaded with God to let me keep my dad. Maybe if I prayed hard enough, He wouldn’t punish me as He had done when He had taken away my mom.
Like many men of his generation, my dad had been raised to stifle his feelings and so he handled his grief by throwing himself into his work. He couldn’t sit still. Maybe one day a week, he came home early from work. He hugged me and I smelled his familiar smell. I sat next to him or on his lap. His blue eyes were always ringed with pale red those days and his face looked just as sad as mine. For those moments, we were partners in grief. But it was short-lived. The phone rang, a friend arrived, a dinner date was waiting, and despite my protests, off he went. While our dad could leave our house of pain, Courtney and I were stuck there. He could hug us and tell us he loved us, buy us presents, but he was not capable of filling our mom’s shoes.
This is where Katie stepped in. As our dad’s first child, she had the most experience dealing with him. After we lost our mother, Katie served as the bridge for me and Courtney with our dad. If I had a problem I felt he wasn’t listening to or couldn’t deal with, I went to Katie and she would work it out with him. With her steadfastness, her maturity, and her dependability, Katie morphed from a stepsister to something of a substitute mother for me.
My relationship with Courtney also began to shift. Suddenly Courtney and I were no longer vying for our mother’s attention. My sister was just as devastated and, because she was younger, even more confused than I was. One day shortly after the accident, Courtney was looking at some jewelry my dad had bought my mom recently that was still in its box. Liz said, “Oh, lovey, don’t touch that. That’s going back,” and Courtney said, “Is Mommie coming back to get it?” She couldn’t really comprehend that our mother was gone forever.
Though we bore only a faint resemblance to each other, we both looked like our mother in different ways. Just looking at my sister’s face could be healing for me; she was a living, breathing reminder of Mommie. One Sunday morning, I remember Courtney came into my room. She pushed the door open and saw me playing with my Barbies. She sat next to me. I flinched slightly. Was she about to wreck my things? But she didn’t. She watched and listened. “Toosh, can I play too?” she asked sweetly. For the first time, I said “yes.”
This was the beginning of a new closeness between us. A mutual understanding that we had both lost our favorite person, our dearest protector. No longer the squabbling sisters we were before November 29, we had become motherless overnight. The cells in our bodies had shifted. Courtney at seven became more tender with me. At eleven I became more protective of her. I don’t know if I would have been okay if it wasn’t for Courtney.
Everyone in the family coped in their own way. Baba responded to the death of her beloved daughter by clinging to her memory with fierce tenacity. Maria Gurdin gave the world Natalie Wood, managed her career, kept her in the spotlight. By sheer force of will, she had parlayed her little girl’s natural gifts into wealth for her family. Even before my mother died, the fact that Natalie Wood had been her daughter was completely fused with Baba’s identity, her self-worth, her reason for living. Afterward, Baba’s focus was mostly on herself and her famous daughter. Now, whenever I saw her, she would tell me about how some group was honoring her for being Natalie Wood’s mother. This validated my grandmother’s existence, but it made me cringe.
Ever since her daughter first got into the movie business, Baba had taken care of her fan mail, and after my mother married my dad, Baba started looking after his mail too. Though my mother was gone, Baba didn’t stop—she kept on sending out photos. She had stacks of eight-by-ten photographs of my mom and dad that she would autograph and mail to fans. I often wondered if anybody knew that it was Baba signing my mother’s ones. She even took the eight-by-tens to my mother’s grave site and sat there, so that when fans came to pay their respects, she could give them a signed photo.
My aunt Olga—my mom’s older half sister—lived in San Francisco and had three sons, and so she stayed in close contact with us via phone, calling regularly, sending us presents for birthdays and Christmas, and visiting when she could. My dad truly appreciated her support. When we saw her, she would share stories about my mom and show us pictures of them when they were young.
Then there was my aunt Lana, my mother’s younger sister. My mom’s relationship with her younger sister was much more complex than the one she shared with Olga. Theirs had been a troubled relationship for many years—with periods of closeness followed by periods of estrangement. Clearly, there was once a lot of love between my mother and Lana, but by the time I was born, their relationship had become strained. Though my aunt was at our house for the holidays, she was never part of my parents’ inner circle.
My parents liked to surround themselves with people they trusted, and as far as they were concerned, Lana was not that person. At their second wedding, Lana’s then husband, Richard, had been allowed to photograph the ceremony on the condition that the photos were private. Later, my parents found out that the photos had been sold to a fan magazine. A lot of the arguments between Lana and my mom revolved around money—I remember walking into my mom’s bedroom and hearing my mother tell Liz that Lana had asked her for money yet again. Liz remembers that Lana would go to boutiques where my mom had house accounts and charge clothing. “Put it on Natalie’s account!” she would say. At the end of the month, Liz would receive the bills for clothes my mother had never purchased. When my mom would ask Lana about the charges Lana would become defensive and another cold front would move in between the two of them. Another story I’ve heard from those times is that Lana asked my parents for seven thousand dollars so her daughter, Evan, could go to private school, but instead used the money for her own plastic surgery, having her nose narrowed to look more like my mother’s.
It can’t have been easy for Lana to grow up with a sister who was a star. Even though she was able to carve out a brief career for herself in Hollywood, she was always overshadowed by her sister’s fame, not to mention her own mother’s obsession with Natalie. Years later, I read an article about Lana where she told the interviewer: “Natalie was the embodiment of what my [mom] longed for in life. She worshipped Nat, I was the forgotten daughter.… After Nat died, it turned out that she was stuck with the daughter she didn’t really care about that much.”
In my mother’s will, it stated that Lana was to have her wardrobe, perhaps because the sisters had always worn similar clothes and traded outfits when they were girls and teenagers. My mother probably never imagined she would die so young and suddenly and that Lana would take the bequest so literally. She had been dead for less than a month when Lana came to take away her clothes. Courtney and I had stayed home from school that day because some kids were teasing us about our mom’s death. Liz looked out the window from my mother’s office, which was in her bedroom, and saw Lana and two friends pull up with a U-Haul. Lana rang the doorbell and told Liz that she had come to get our mom’s clothes. Liz told her that the will had not even gone to probate. Lana replied that she had come to take what was rightfully hers. She told Liz she was worried pieces of the clothing would get lost or misplaced if she didn’t come sooner rather than later. Liz called my dad at the studio and told him what was going on. He said, “Just let her come in and take the clothes.” Courtney and I were both upset and afraid. We were worried about what the closets would look like without any of our mother’s things.
I remember sitting on my mom’s bed and watching as Lana and her two friends pushed rolling racks into the room. They commandeered her closet with the efficiency of a military operation. I watched them go in and out with armfuls of clothes. In and out. Back and forth.
I do not recall any comfort or tenderness from Lana that day. She coolly went about her business. At some point, I went into my mom’s smaller closet, where her nighties and bras were kept. The room was dark and still smelled like her. I wanted some of the pale, puffy bras she always wore. I took a couple and some nighties and then got back into her bed.
I asked Lana why she was taking my mom’s bras, underwear, and nighties. She told me, “Your mom wants me to have them.”
Three hours later, Lana and her friends had emptied my mom’s closets. Every thread of my mom’s beautiful and elaborate wardrobe—her original Edith Head gowns, her striped T-shirts, her soft lavender dresses, her rainbow of silk shirts, the fancy outfits she wore when she went out, her shoes, coats, handbags, even the rest of her nightgowns and undergarments—was gone. Only blank space was left behind.
My dad offered to pay Lana for some important pieces, sending her a check for eleven thousand dollars for a few fur coats that he wanted to keep for Courtney and me. She returned the furs, but she wouldn’t allow him to pay her for anything else. A few weeks later we found out that Lana had sold all my mom’s clothes to a resale store, even though she had promised my dad she wouldn’t. Apparently she didn’t have room in her apartment to keep them all. The resale store hung a sign in the window advertising that the clothes “Belonged to Natalie Wood.” My dad was furious. My mother would have hated that her clothes—right down to her undergarments—were on public display, ending up in the closets of strangers and collectors. None of us were able to forgive Lana for that. After that, my aunt was no longer welcome in our home.