Lana Wood: Still Working To Bring Natalie Wood justice

“How about no devils?” Lana Wood said on the phone recently, recounting a presentation she gave at CrimeCon in June.

Her sister, Natalie Wood, had left her first husband, Robert Wagner, after a marital betrayal, Lana says she told her. But Natalie decided, in 1972, to go back to him — because “sometimes the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t.”

Nine years later, Natalie would die under suspicious circumstances. Her body was found floating off Catalina Island in California near a boat on which she, Mr. Wagner and Christopher Walken had spent the evening. Also on board was the skipper, Dennis Davern.

At the time, Ms. Wood’s death was ruled an accident and the case was closed.

But in 2011, the investigation was reopened by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department after Mr. Davern said he heard Ms. Wood and Mr. Wagner arguing earlier in the evening. After re-evaluating the case details, the coroner changed the cause of Ms. Wood’s death to “drowning and other undetermined factors.”

Since then, more witnesses have emerged that have led the police to reclassify Ms. Wood’s death as “suspicious” and to consider Mr. Wagner, now 89, as “a person of interest.” The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department did not offer specifics about the witnesses’ identities or statements.

According to Ralph Hernandez, the lead homicide detective, Mr. Wagner has not talked to the police since 1981. “I think that Wagner holds the key,” Detective Hernandez said in a phone interview. “It’s really only up to him at this point.”

Whether Mr. Wagner can be charged with a crime isn’t clear. Because of the statute of limitations on lesser crimes, murder is the only one that could be considered, Detective Hernandez said.

At the CrimeCon presentation, in New Orleans, Ms. Wood stressed that though “there may be a statute of limitations on a crime, there is not one on the truth.” Detective Hernandez said that the revised coroner’s report states that Natalie appeared to be a victim of assault and battery, and that the coroner could not rule out that she was unconscious before she hit the water. “Robert Wagner maintains her death was an accident. How was she accidentally assaulted?” Ms. Wood asked the crowd at CrimeCon.

A few months before, she sat for a steak salad and a long talk at a restaurant in Los Angeles, where she lives with her three grandchildren, whom she is raising with her son-in law. (Her daughter, Evan, died in 2017 of heart failure.)

“I think the truth about Natalie’s murder is very important to other women,” Ms. Wood said. As a veteran of Hollywood herself, she watched the #MeToo era unfold with excitement, tinged with weariness. Her advocacy for Natalie in the media for 38 years has left her particularly alert to men’s abuses.

Still a dazzler at 73, Lana was dressed smartly in black pants and black sweater, with an engaging manner. “You need to speak up to fraternal Hollywood,” she said, “and also understand the price that is paid for that type of life. Natalie paid dearly — with her life. Nothing was done about that.”

Natalie had always been the protective older sister to Lana, eight years younger. She left her entire wardrobe to Lana in her will: rooms full of the clothing she’d armed herself with for decades. Natalie subscribed to the notion that clothing was armor, especially in predatory Hollywood.

In a 2008 memoir, “Pieces of My Heart,” which portrays Lana in a largely unfavorable light, Mr. Wagner made an issue of her selling the clothing at a secondhand store. Lana said the will had stipulated that whatever she didn’t want should be sold.

From the late 1950s right up to before Natalie’s death in 1981, the Wood sisters could be seen arm in arm all around town, in high spirits and beautiful clothes. While Natalie expressed everything through the deep pools of her brown eyes, topping her outfits off with the perfect sunglasses, Lana’s most expressive feature was her voice. She became as adept at using it, both to sing and to stand up for herself.

“Natalie was always very careful to present herself as a movie star,” she said. “I simply didn’t care. I wore what I liked to.”

Natalie also left behind the suspicious circumstances surrounding her death, however, and now their roles are reversed. As Lana fielded texts from her granddaughter during lunch (“I always want to correct her grammar”), she continued: “Protecting Natalie, that’s what I really feel I have to do now. If it’s not me, it’s not going to happen.

“As far as the difference between us,” Lana said, “Natalie was very cautious about what she said. I never thought about that. It isn’t that I didn’t have a filter — I did — but if things go wrong, I tell someone about it.” Her eyes welled when she described her sister’s terror before a rare unscripted interview on “The Merv Griffin Show.” Lana told her to just be herself. Natalie replied, “‘I’m just going to pretend I’m you!’”

According to Detective Hernandez, Lana has been indispensable and credible.

“She is the one family member willing to cooperate in the investigation,” he said. “We work for the victim’s family. So we consider Lana Natalie Wood’s family and that’s who we’re working for, to try and find out the truth about what happened to her sister. The case is going to stay open until we find out the truth of what happened.”

Mr. Wagner’s publicist, Alan Nierob, declined to make his client available for comment on his relationship with Lana, or the case.

Lana is estranged from her nieces, Natasha Wagner and Courtney Gregson Wagner, but was contacted in January by Laurent Bouzereau, the director of an HBO documentary about Natalie Wood, which Natasha Wagner helped produce. Mr. Bouzereau asked her to participate, and Lana refused, writing a note to Mr. Bouzereau in which she asked him to let Natasha “know that I completely understand she also wishes to keep her pain and her family’s at a minimum.”

But as far as Lana is concerned, the notion that Natalie accidentally drowned after getting into a dinghy, alone, on a stormy night is preposterous. “Let’s be truthful about who she was and how she was,” she said. “I am not making judgments. I am not supposing. I’m not doing any of those things. I’m simply looking at facts. Natalie didn’t swim. Her fear of dark water was deeply ingrained.”

At CrimeCon Lana discussed another detail. “Natalie would not go anywhere not fully made-up, wearing something terrific,” she said. “She certainly would not get into a dinghy in her nightgown by herself. She would get dressed, put on full makeup and have Dennis Davern take her ashore to stay in a motel on Catalina, which is exactly what she did the night before, when she wanted to leave.”

The tale of Natalie and Lana Wood begins in post-World War II Los Angeles, where the sisters were led by their determined Russian immigrant mother, Maria, to the gates of Hollywood, to be raised almost entirely by the studio system there.

Natalie, the accommodating oldest child, rose to stardom beginning at age 5, while Lana’s first scene, as an infant alongside 8-year-old Natalie in “Driftwood,” went to the cutting-room floor. Lana would spend the coming years on Natalie’s movie sets traipsing after Maria and Natalie or left at home with her father, Nick Zakharenko, who preferred to drink and read surrounded by his portraits of the Romanovs.

In 1954, after Natalie had starred in “Rebel Without a Cause,” with Lana spending many nights on the set sleeping with a pillow and a blanket that Maria had packed as shoots ran late; after the terror of watching Natalie’s character raise her arms to signal the beginning of the race that would almost send James Dean’s character over the cliff; after all that, Natalie was summoned one night to an audition at a Los Angeles hotel.

She was 16 years old. When Natalie finally emerged, she was in hysterics, destroyed. She had been raped by another actor over twice her age, she told her mother and sister.

From her pillow and blanket in the back seat of the family car, Lana witnessed her mother hushing Natalie into secrecy. They filed no report.

Instead, Lana, said, Maria nudged Lana forward. Within the year, John Ford cast her along with Natalie and John Wayne in “The Searchers.’” From there Lana was rushed from role to role, her screen fathers flickering past her — Jack Lemmon, Charlton Heston, Walter Matthau. Maria waited in the wings just as she had done for Natalie: to be educated by tutors on set, provided by the studio, taught to bathe, dress and comport herself by studio wardrobe women, attending school only when it didn’t interfere.

But at 14, Lana ran away from home. She didn’t want to be groomed by Maria to follow Natalie’s yellow brick road, she said now, but rather to be a normal unscripted teenager. She turned to her sister for protection. Natalie was fierce. She threatened to never speak to Maria again if Lana was dragged to one more audition. And thus Lana was excused from Hollywood.

But her time there taught her a few lessons. Along with Natalie, Lana had come to feel the sheer joy of being a glorious clotheshorse out and about: trying this on and that, stepping through doors exhilarated by a drape of sumptuous fabric caressing her shoulders, encircling her hips.

“I love a terrific jacket,” Lana said. “I just counted how many I have two weeks ago. I have 79 of them!” Her favorite designers are Stella McCartney and Alexander McQueen. “Because there’s always something lovely there, but then there’s a little edge too.”

In 1962, Lana was 16, living on her own in an apartment in Westwood, spending her weekends at Natalie’s, where her older sister was living with Warren Beatty. If Mr. Beatty stepped out of line, Lana would call him on it pronto, she said.

In the afternoons after school, Lana got a job as a model and shop girl at the clothing boutique Jax, where she was surrounded not only by smart clothing but also a women’s wear credo so forward-thinking it might as well have been another planet.

Jax was owned by the former Los Angeles Angels shortstop Jack Hanson. He left baseball to reinvent sportswear for women, advancing the cigarette pant by moving the zipper from the side to the back — not just for comfort but to flatter the rear end. The garment became a staple for Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy.

Mr. Hanson teamed up with the avant-garde designer Rudi Gernreich, who had removed the boning in women’s bathing suits in the 1950s to free the body, because, as he wrote in his design manifesto, “the only respect you can give to a woman is to make her a human being, a totally emancipated women.”

Mr. Gernreich was out to “to cure society of its sexual hangups,” designing clothing for women to “take our minds off how we look and concentrate on really important matters in the world.” Lana was enthralled.

She modeled for a year at Jax, while picking clothes up off the floor for clients like Susan Hayward. Then one day Steve McQueen’s wife, Neile, popped in to the store and convinced Lana it was time to get back to acting.

But Lana feared the burdens of celebrity. “I wasn’t acting to become anything other than an actor,” she said. “That was it! I love getting the script. I love doing the part, but when they say ‘it’s a wrap’ at the end of the day, I want to just go wherever it is I want to go.”

She recalled marching downtown and getting herself “informally deputized’ by the county’s animal commissioner, “so I could keep an eye on the shelters and come up with a plan to improve them.”

Another thing Lana loved to do was go home and write. (Putnam published her memoir, “Natalie,” in 1984. In his own memoir, Mr. Wagner called it “ridiculous.”)

At 18 Lana took a different tack, becoming one of Judy Garland’s protectors while the star was on tour in Australia. “It was a major responsibility,” she writes in “Natalie”: “I was the only other female in her entourage of six. I was pretty much left to handle Judy alone. They would send me to her room when she wasn’t there and say go through all her clothing, anything that’s sharp, that she could hurt herself with — remove! All the things I’d heard about her, that she was pathologically insecure, unstable and one of the most delightful people you’d ever want to know were absolutely true.” And yet, she writes:” “I had never seen her perform and was captured by her magic.”

That magical motion of singing, that lifting of the spirit, was something Lana had always loved to do herself and still does. “I sing all the time, everywhere,” she said during lunch. “When I was in high school, I remember singing an entire song in a classroom unbidden. I walked in singing it. The bell rang. I didn’t care. I wasn’t done, so I completed the song.”

When she arrived in 1965 on the director Mark Rydell’s set of “The Long Hot Summer,” Lana recalled, “he took one look at me and said, ‘What can I get for you?’ I said a tambourine. So, in he came the next morning with a tambourine. I took it everywhere I went. Sometimes I’d play it in the car.”

On Tuesday nights Lana would use it onstage while singing with the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, an act of the soon-to-be-renowned producer Michael Lloyd.

“The first thing you need to know about Lana is she’s just a great girl,” Mr. Lloyd said in a phone interview. “Period. She had a great voice. It’s unique, a lot of personality and you know she put it all out there. I should’ve cut it!”

By the time Lana was 19, she was starring with Mia Farrow and Ryan O’Neal in “Peyton Place;” shot by Federico Fellini’s photographer with a leopard by her side — and, she said, begged by Sergio Leone to relocate to Rome and sign a contract with him; pursued by Alain Delon across the continents; nagged by Dennis Hopper to accept a lead role in “Easy Rider.”

“Oh boy! I wanted none of that!” she said.

It wasn’t long before the call came from Playboy asking her to pose. She wore her boyfriend’s cat in her lap in one shot and her bridesmaid’s dress from Natalie’s wedding in another, assuring her sister that the photos were very tasteful. “I’m sure they’re absolutely yummy,” Natalie said.

“I said to myself, ‘Why did I do semi-nudes?’” Lana said. “I’m saying something to the world that I don’t want to say. ‘Look at me! I’m so pretty,’ is not what I want to say to the world!”

She tracked down Hugh Hefner’s home phone number and asked him to kill the photos. “We finally got down to talking about the poetry that I was writing and he said, ‘Well, could we publish that along with the photos?’” Lana recalled. “I said O.K.! That would be O.K.”

Next she was cast as a Bond girl, Plenty O’Toole, alongside Sean Connery in “Diamonds Are Forever.”

“I wanted my Bond Girl to be liked,” Lana said. “I want to be liked with my flaws because that’s the one thing that means something to me. Perfection is who you are, whoever that is. That’s your perfection.”

Her costume designer was Donfeld, who also did the original “Wonder Woman” and gave her an “emotional class” in the character. In Plenty’s last scene, she is thrown through a high hotel window into a swimming pool below, which Lana accomplished without a stunt double, she said, plummeting from a towering platform on full display for an enormous crowd of gamblers on the Vegas Strip, wearing less than she had in Playboy.

“When you are playing a character, the first thing that happens is you are affected by the clothing,” Lana said. “It’s very powerful. Your entire persona changes for that period of time. It carries you over, and it can follow you into your personal life.”

Modeling jobs for designers filled gaps between acting. In 1968 Bob Mackie hired Lana to walk snaking through dozens of tables for his packed “best sellers” luncheon at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, modeling gowns he had designed for Judy Garland.

Then there was the renowned photographer Guy Webster, who often shot from his skateboard. “Guy liked to undo my hair by spritzing me with a water bottle to return me to my natural look,” Lana said. One afternoon, after a shoot in the late ’60s, a beautiful woman with long dark hair appeared.

“She’s a witch,” Mr. Webster told her.

“Really?”

“Yes, she is — just let her stand with you for a little while.”

"So I stood there next to her,” Lana said, “and all of a sudden tears were streaming down her cheeks. She walked away from me. Guy went and talked to her then came back and said, ‘She sees you surrounded by death.’”

The morning that Natalie’s body was found adrift off Catalina Island, Lana writes in her memoir, “I went upstairs and washed my hair in the bathroom sink. I hadn’t used the sink for this purpose for many years, not since Natalie and I were children.”

She later opened a condolence note from Donfeld: a sketch of a dress he had designed for Natalie for her final film, “Brainstorm.” On the back Donfeld had written, “Natalie thought you hung the moon.”

After lunch, outside the restaurant, with a light rain misting the air, Lana appeared petite even in her black high-heeled boots. Her grandson texted to ask if she was on her way home yet and why she had picked a restaurant — the Palm — so far from the house.

“No matter what it is. I talk to my grandkids all the time when they say they don’t want to do this or that, that it’s not important. I say, ‘You don’t understand that even though you feel like a pebble, you’re leaving ripples and you don’t know where those ripples will go and you at least must try and do something!’”

Lana said she has started a new memoir.

“I want to leave behind something that helps something,” she said. “I don’t care how small it is as long as I’ve accomplished something that might someday make a difference. I don’t want to be thought of as, ‘Oh my, wasn’t she pretty.’ No. No.”

Oh my. Thanks for posting. I just don't know what to think about Natalie's case.

Thanks for posting, OP.

I absolutely understand why Wagner would be irritated by constant false accusations and be unwilling to talk to police, but at the same time, I don't understand why he doesn't want to help with the still-unanswered questions.

To summarize she wasn't there and has no first hand knowledge of the actions and motivations of the parties that night. She has nothing but opinions now hardened into prejudices. She might even be right but it's all a dead end.

I remember a few years ago she and the grandkids were living in a motel.

Of course I don't know for sure because I wasn't there either, but I believe Wagner pushed her, and Christopher Walken knows something. I hope they get to the bottom of it before Walken/Wagner/Lana die because with even one of those parties gone, it will probably remain unsolved. Obviously she wasn't there but she's been putting pressure on the police and kept the case alive.

One thing that annoyed me about this article was her humble bragging about all the career offers she (allegedly) didn't take... how Alain Delon pursued her, she turned down Easy Rider, Sergio Leone wanted her to go to Italy and sign a contract - yet she did Playboy and was a trashy Bond girl? Despite wanting to be taken seriously and not wanting to be famous? Sure Jan. And oh yeah, of course she personally tried to get Hugh Hefner to kill the photos!!

It's very easy to say all of this now but the reality is she was a clotheshorse actress/model at the time, not some thoroughbred Bette Davis type. She DID want to be more famous and have these big career breakthroughs, and just wasn't getting any classier offers than the likes of Playboy.

Lana had known Dennis Hopper since the 1950s when she was a little girl, so I fully believe she was considered for EASY RIDER, though probably not seriously. She later did a knock-off of EASY RIDER called THE INNERVIEW.

I've been watching reruns of Hart to Hart on the Hallmark Channel, and I can see absolutely no differences in Wagner's demeanor nor appearance after Natalie's death, which occurred in the middle of the series' run.

It's highly unusual and suspicious to have your spouse die under tragic circumstances and it not visibly affect you. Not to mention the fact that he shacked up with Jill St. John before Wood's body was even cold.

I mean, at this point, maybe just let it go????

The public loves a mystery, especially when fame, money, and beauty is involved. Did Dominick Dunne every report on this story?

The public loves a mystery, especially when fame, money, and beauty is involved. Did Dominick Dunne every report on this story?

I would think Walken knows plenty. I wonder what he would say under oath.

Wagner is 89 and probably isn’t going to be around much longer anyway. It’s kind of late now.

I have no desire to see Wagner go to prison or anything. I’m just nosy and would like to know what really happened.

This is obviously very fishy. If Wagner were innocent, he'd be fully cooperative with the investigation.

Lana is a jealous, talentless whore. END OF THREAD.

r26=Robert Wagner

Robert Wagner, bisexual murderer!

Well, SMELL Miss R26!

I wish Ryan Murphy would do a double feature version of American Crime Story where the first part of the season covers the Lana Turner/Joey Stefanato murder, and the second half covers the Natalie Wood murder.

There's probably not enough material in either murder to fill up an entire season, but a double feature season would be fun.

The new American Crime Story is about the Clinton impeachment R30.

Is Lana still complaining that she took her sister's furs and they were worthless?

[post redacted because linking to dailymail.co.uk clearly indicates that the poster is either a troll or an idiot (probably both, honestly.) Our advice is that you just ignore this poster but whatever you do, don't click on any link to this putrid rag.]

Does she still show her titties?

Showing her titties back in the day.

Weren't there rumors going before Natalie's passing that he was having an affair with Stephanie Powers?

R18 Not true. Mike Todd was killed during “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and you can’t see any kind of change in Elizabeth Taylor’s demeanor or performance.

Natalie died in November of 81. Wagner got together with Jill in February of 82 (allegedly). What a grieving widower.

RJ does strike me as that kind of guy who just always needs a wife. And I’m sure in those circles there’s always some woman ready to step right in.

She sounds a little kooky, like the nieces stay clear of her. Sounds like she's into psychics and astrology and superstition. And her thoughts seem disorganized.

I thought she was a wooden actress. Attractive in a Russ Meyer-type way but not movie star material. But she makes it sound like she turned her back on stardom(!).

[quote] RJ does strike me as that kind of guy who just always needs a wife

Suggested corrections

[quote] RJ does strike me as that kind of guy who just always needs a beard

[quote] RJ does strike me as that kind of guy who just always needs a cock

Kinda weird that she makes a movie shortly after her sister's death where she's running and screaming from the ocean.....

JFC, those areolas are the size of baseballs. Gross!

R42 "Shot in 1978, not released until 1982." Must be a real gem of a film

Ah, OK, that makes a little more sense.

Isn’t Courtney a heroin addict?

From a gay man, those are some damn nice titties. If I were a woman, I would be very pleased with them.

For being the daughter of a very attractive couple... :/

that's Natalie's daughter? Looks like her.

Lana's been married six times? Must be a peach.

Lana had gone through four husbands before she turned thirty. Married her first one at age sixteen. Yikes.

Natasha and Courtney resemble her but they’re not attractive at all.

Why is everybody so down on Lana? Give the lady a break. Her daughter died two years ago, at 73 she's helping her son-in-law raise her three grandkids, despite the fact that she's basically been destitute in her old age.

Should she probably let this go, for her own good? Yes. But I can't blame her for being unable to stop seeking closure. Natalie died *very* mysteriously, and the two of them had been quite close.

My theory is that Wagner did hit or push Natalie overboard and laugh at her cries for help, as described by other people who were in the cove that night and heard splashing and chilling cries and laughter and mocking. I also think they were both quite drunk (it was documented that they drank and fought all day), and Wagner probably was in a complete blackout. Since he doesn't remember what happened, he decided long ago that it wasn't his fault or even his problem.

So Lana can't ever really get the closure she seeks: a confession from Wagner and a description of Natalie's final minutes. She won't ever get it because there's nobody to give it to her. And that is truly tragic.

Lana sounds like a white-trash loser.

Hands off R.J.! Without Hart to Hart my post gym dinner evenings would not be the same. Maybe things got a little out of control, who cares at this point. Maybe they shouldn’t have all been so drunk.

Lana is responsible for her own choices in life. The multiple, short-lived marriages tells me she's nuts.

She's eating at The Palm but living in a transient motel?

RJ should be ashamed.

The woman is crazy. And during her lifetime she leeched off her sister. I don't know why the NY Times would waste space on her.

Although barely a plot point, In "Once Upon Time...in Hollywood" there's a female character named Lana, who is apparently very annoying. While on a boat she is killed by her husband..allegedly. We see her very briefly in flashback, and she is instantly unlikable.

I immediately saw this as Tarantino taking a dig at Lana Wood.

Was Lana too grand to find a real job after the acting jobs dried up? She may be old now, but what about the last 30 years?

In and out of motels and evicted from rentals. Trash!

Walken was giving his cock to Wagner. Natalie walked in on it and flipped out (probably the reason for their first divorce). She had a drinking problem herself, and just drowned.

They couldn't save her or call for help because they were shit-faced drunk, and because their secret might be revealed.

I think that RJ was covering things up - but NOT the stuff we think of today. Both Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood were die hard old school "Movie Stars" from an earlier era - they were disciplined with the old Hedda Hopper/Louella Parsons rules - "Never be photographed with a drink or cigarette at your table, always be happy, always be clean, always be classy." .... I think that he may have been protecting her movie star image that night - his as well. Don"t forget he was starring in Hart to Hart - think of the old fashioned morals clauses in contracts. From what I have read over the years they were both high strung and volitale - they might have had a big nasty awful drunken fight where she "Diva" flounced out drunkenly - full of adrenaline - thinking - I'll show you - you try to find me - you will be sorry - Then she is drunk and disoriented and can't get back. Who here hasn't gotten snorting mad grabbed their car keys to storm out and then just fizzled out and come home? ...... Maybe they were like Nicole Kidman & Perry on Big Little Lies - Maybe they liked it a little rough - I can't see RJ Wagner telling the world and his daughters that they played rough sometimes .... Plus how premeditated a monster would he be to make sure she puts on her socks and big red jacket before he takes her up and tosses her overboard. ..........

R62 I’ve always believed the “flouncing off in a drunken huff” scenario too.

“Fuck you! I don’ haveta take thish!” And then - whoops.

Lana never mentions, even in her memoir, her marriage to fellow "Peyton Place" co-star Stephen Oliver in 1966. The marriage was also annulled in 1966, but he was one of her six husbands.

Jack Wrather Jr. – (1962-1963; annulled when she was 16 years old)

Karl Brent – (1964-1965; divorced)

Stephen Oliver – (1966-1966; annulled)

Dr. Stanley William Vogel (1968-1968; divorced)

Richard Smedley – (1972-1976; divorced) one child, Evan Taylor Smedley Maldonado (August 11, 1974 - July 18, 2017), by whom she has three grandchildren

Allan G. Balter (1979-1980; divorced)

My god R65

She had wowza jugs.

But they were already much less buoyant by the end of the decade.

Why did Lana have awesome jugs, while Nat was a Flatty Patty?

R67, Ryan O'Neal, Sean Connery and Alain Delon played with those.

She looks like a Russian escort.

Rebel Without A SNAP Card

Those tits make me gag.

[Quote] Those tits make me gag.

Pendulous balls, OTOH...

Despite any hard feelings, a rich man like Wagner who lets any close relative live in a motel is vile.

Are you surprised he wants nothing to with her?

She's a crazy cunt. RJ helped her numerous times.

R75, Doesn't one of Madonna's brothers live under a bridge?

I've read a good deal about this case. Some odd things that I'll point out:

* WALKEN was married, still is to the same woman. Why wasn't she onboard ? They don't have children so it's not like she decided to stay behind with them.

* DAVERN, the boat skipper claims that WAGNER & WALKEN did not get along well. The night before NATALIE drowned, the skipper and NATALIE left to stay on shore for the night and booked two rooms at an inn in Avalon. Why did WALKEN stay onboard ? Was this to allow WAGNER & WALKEN to be alone ? Anyone 'in the know' in Hollywood is aware that both men are bi-sexual. WALKEN for Chrissakes used to be one of those boy dancers who backed up the likes of ANN-MARGRET. What ruined the WAGNERS marriage the first go- round back in 1961 was that NATALIE caught WAGNER fucking a man; that's the 'devil you know'. LANA was understandably perplexed when NATALIE told her in 1972 that she & WAGNER were going to remarry which was when NATALIE explained with the "sometime the devil you know is better than the devil you don't" . NATALIE had decided that she could live with and accept RJ' bisexuality. That aside, the two had adored one another. RJ' bisexuality was also why TINA SINATRA called off their pending marriage in !970, 71.

[QUOTE]Natalie could live with and accept RJ' bisexuality

" Why yes, I'm good with that ............. "

When did Mart Crowley enter the picture?

R80, Apparently, so could Marion Donen and Jill St. John.

Natalie had an affair with Frank Sinatra. RJ dated Tina Sinatra. If they had all married, Natalie would have been RJ's step-mother-in-law.

So did Natalie just want a walker by the time she got back with RJ?

R76 R77

LANA is not a crazy lady. RJ however, as well as NATALIE years earlier has helped her on more than one occasion. For various reasons LANA never became self sufficient which the latter two grew weary of over the years. The last time that NATALIE loaned LANA money she kept it all very businesslike as her younger sister was by then 30 years old and still constantly in need.

Once JILL was in the picture she had no patience whatsoever with LANA and was very firm in telling RJ how he was to handle his former sister-in-law.

Here's another piece of trivia for you guys: Although JILL and NATALIE had known one another since the two were child actors, NATALIE did not like JILL, never did. NATALIE considered JILL a cold fish, calculating. NATALIE was always gracious in public when the two would meet but believe me, NATALIE never did one gd thing with her outside of an industry function: no lunches, never invited her to any of her homes for dinner, nothing.

R79, It was their butler who Natalie caught in the act with RJ. Though two rooms were booked on Natalie's credit card, Natale asked Davern if he would sleep in her room, which he did. The night of the drowning, Natalie, Walken and Wagner spent hours getting sloshed at Doug's Harbor Reef Restaurant. They left the restaurant so inebriated, the manager contacted the harbor master to ensure that they returned to the Splendour safely.

R82

RJ & MARION had known one another since around 1950 when both were FOX contract players. MARION was really cool, very savvy, fun. RJ started 'seeing her' before his divorce to NATALIE was final. He moved to Europe for a while too. JILL is an extremely astute woman; she's no fool. You'd never pick up on it from her acting which is barely tolerable. I don't know her that well but I will say that NATALIE' observation of her from 50 years ago is fairly on target. Put into it what you might.

If you know all this stuff about these players, I hope you put it down somewhere. As mentioned upthread, RJ is likely not long for this world. It would be great to have a well written piece that busted some of the lies and myths surrounding the people discussed here.

Enough with the all caps of the NAMES.

R86

Yes. What's particularly funny is that NATALIE'S mother had tried to warn her off from marrying him back in 1957 and pointedly asked, "why does he have that fruity looking major domo ? NATALIE that is peculiar, what does it mean ?"

NATALIE was weary of the guy after that. I never saw him but I heard enough about him. He apparently looked and acted like a Pictionary answer come to life for the word FAIRY. In their first home there was an extra room over by the garage that they'd used as a den of sorts. NATALIE woke up one night around 1 am. RJ wasn't in their room nor in their bathroom so she went looking for him and found the RJ fucking the butler in that room by the garage. It damn near killed her. This was in the Spring of 1961.

I'm 84 and if I want to write NAMES in capitals, then I will.

About 15 years ago, Lana was selling personal items of Natalie's that she had somehow obtained, mainly items from Natalie's lifelong stuffed animal collection. A good friend of mine, a rabid Natalie fan, purchased several from her. Lana put him in contact with a man who owned a Mercedes-Benz Natalie once owned. My friend offered to purchase it from him, but the man said he would only sell my friend the steering wheel, which my friend thought was hilarious.

R88

Most of us who knew them have our theories. I assure you we all discussed them for some time decades ago. We are good with that and have our most likely scenarios. LANA is determined to prove them. Personally, I do not believe a thing will come of it.

Wouldn't Natalie's mother call her "Natasha"?

Her areolas are the size of pancakes. Gross!

R93 are you KELT?

How did you know Natalie and RJ?

Her areolas are the size of manhole covers. YUM!

Can you imagine those tits NOW? She must tuck them into her belt.

I'm not sure she wears a belt.

There's such a thing as support bras, you know.

Svetlana, is that you?

Interesting recent posts about RJ and the butler from the insider! Was wondering, though: I’d heard that Natalie’s affair with Warren Beatty during “Splendor in the Grass” also contributed to the end of her first marriage to RJ. Wasn’t that a factor?

Yes, RJ wanted some of that D.

[quote]Lana Wood: Still Working To Bring Natalie Wood justice

Lana Wood: Still trying to leech off her sister's fame and make a buck.

If you've been married six times and all of the marriages but one barely lasted a year, the problem is you. Even the 4-year marriage probably only lasted that long because of the kid.

She should have parlayed those giant tits into a cushy gig as a trophy wife long ago, but she doesn't seem like she was stable enough to make a gig like that work out for her. I seriously wonder if their mother wasn't pimping both those girls out when they were young--it would explain both of their problems later on.

[quote]r104 Lana Wood: Still trying to leech off her sister's fame and make a buck.

Oh. Unlike the star's own daughters, who created a whole line of Natalie Wood items for sale?

Natalie Wood air freshener??

[italic"This spring marked the introduction of Natalie, a gardenia-focused fragrance ($95 for 1.7 ounces) that is a nod to Wood’s signature perfume, reinvented with fresh notes of orange flower and hints of freesia and rose. This month, a candle ($55) was added to the collection, as was a gift set featuring the eau de parfum, a purse spray and body cream ($125), exclusively at Macy’s stores and macys.com. Next up, likely in time for Valentine’s Day, are a shower gel, room spray and reed diffuser."

Lana should have hung on to the Wrather kid. His Dad built the Disneyland Hotel and was filthy rich.

Lana by her own admission married the last hubby for the money. It is in her book.

"Lana by her own admission married the last hubby for the money."

Everything she's ever done has been "for the money", including her claims that Natalie was murdered. I wonder how much she gets paid for interviews?

[quote]I've been watching reruns of Hart to Hart on the Hallmark Channel, and I can see absolutely no differences in Wagner's demeanor nor appearance after Natalie's death, which occurred in the middle of the series' run.

Wood is wood.

Considering her living conditions, whatever she gets paid isn't much.

A friend met her at one of those shows where washed up celebrities will sign memorabilia for money. For a fee, you could have her call someone you know to wish them a happy birthday. My friend hired her to call me on my upcoming birthday. I wasn't home when she called, but Lana left me a voicemail.

Why can't Robert be compelled to do an interview with the police, I don't get it. 😕 Mariska Hargitay could force a confession.

Natalie's perfume was Jungle Gardenia by the long defunct perfumer Tuvache.

Yeah. And now her daughters are ripping it off and slapping a new name on it. For the bucks.

Natalie had the cutest nose.

[quote]Her areolas are the size of personhole covers.

FTFY.

Jungle Gardenia has been around since the 30s. It's vile.

R65, By the time marriage #6 ended, Lana was just 34 years old. When Natalie died in 1981, Lana was living with actor Alan Feinstein, who played the college professor Diane Keaton was fucking in "Looking for Mr. Goodbar".

She looks zaftig in that old pic. That must be one worn out snatch.

As Plenty O'Toole...

So basically Lana was a fat, whorish cut-rate crazy version of her sister?

R122 - Lana's mother.

R112 - "Happy Birthday, Mr. Resident"

Bob & Lana & Death & Malice

Lana ambushes Wagner . . .

What a great video. Lana is mic'd up and has a camera team following her and she acts all innocent. No wonder RJ can't stand her.