A Hollywood Mystery

In 1981 actress Natalie Wood was found dead after falling overboard a yacht. Now her daughter has made a documentary in which – for the first time – her 90-year-old stepfather, Robert Wagner, a longtime suspect, recalls that fateful night

- Ben Hoyle

To tell her story well, Natasha Gregson Wagner knew that one man’s testimony would matter above all others. But after several hours of talking to him in front of the cameras set up at her Los Angeles home, she still didn’t have what she needed.

That man was the actor Robert Wagner – the man she’s called “Daddy Wagner” for as long as she can remember. The man who still, at the age of 90, calls her every day on the phone. And he’s also the man who, ever since she was 11, has been dogged by claims that one terrible night 39 years ago, he killed her mother, actress Natalie Wood, in a drunken rage off the coast of southern California.

For years Natasha (49) shied away from confronting the allegations against her stepfather, even as a resurgence of public interest and a reopening of the police investigation into the case made it clear that others were much less convinced of his innocence than she was.

Becoming a parent herself was part of why she decided to take a stand now.

“For my daughter’s sake, I want the legacy of my mom’s career and the speculation about her death to be clarified. I don’t want that burden to fall on my daughter’s shoulders,” she says.

That led to her producing and fronting Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind, a new HBO documentary that attempts to establish the family’s perspective as the dominant view of what happened.

“I have a narrative of my dad and my mom and the night she died that isn’t the same narrative that a lot of other people have thought about,” she says.