Lana Wood - Little Sister: My Investigation into the Mysterious Death of Natalie Wood

FOR NATALIE.

I smile because you are my sister,

I laugh because there is nothing you can do about it.

U NKNOWN

I was walking through a forest dense with a variety of trees.

Every inch of ground was covered with fallen leaves, and no earth was visible...

I looked up from the path and saw Natalie sitting on the ground, her legs drawn up and her arms around her knees. She looked upset, and kept pulling on the small sparrow-like brownish wings on her back. I told her to stop as they would soon grow into beautiful white wings for her.

She looked at me... And I woke up.

O n the morning of November 29, 1981, movie star Natalie Wood was found off the coast of Catalina Island, drowned after a tumultuous Thanksgiving weekend cruise aboard a yacht called Splendour. With her on that cruise were the yachts skipper, Dennis Davern; her friend and Brainstorm costar Christopher Walken; and her husband, Robert R. J. Wagner.

Like most people, I couldnt believe the news until I saw it on television. Natalie was my big sister and my best friend, and Id grown up following in her footsteps and watching her on the big screen. The shock of losing her so suddenly and the relentless grief of learning to live without her were indescribable. And to lose her in dark water, the one thing in this world that terrified her all her life, made her death seem even more cruel.

I couldnt make sense of her loss, and I turned to R. J. for answers. After the funeral I asked him what happened to my sister, and he would only say: It was an accident, Lana.

L.A.s renowned coroner to the stars, Dr. Thomas Noguchi, officially declared Natalies death an accidental drowning.

The Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department closed the case after two weeks.

I accepted the accident explanation because thats what they said; because it was all I had; because I wanted to; because it hurt too much to not accept it and to let it enter my mind, even for a moment, that maybe it wasnt an accident after all. Of course, I wondered how the accident happened, but R. J. didnt care to discuss it, and I had no one else to ask. Besides, in the end, knowing how it happened wouldnt bring back my sister, and ready or not, my life had to go on.

I was the single mom and sole supporter of a seven-year-old daughter at the time, and the only remaining child of a widowed mother Ill politely call eccentric. Trying to balance my grief with caring for them and maintaining a career so I could support us, while simultaneously sorting through a tsunami of interview requests and the usual Hollywood rumors, was... overwhelming. It seemed as if every day a new book or article or tabloid headline about the life and death of Natalie Wood was hitting the newsstands. I couldnt begin to keep up with them, nor did I want to. It was an accident. She was gone, she shouldnt have been, and the pain was almost unbearable. What more was there to say?

Still, I kept wanting to reach out to R. J. We had never been close, per se, but we were family; I felt we should have been grieving together and comforting each other. And then, when he was ready to talk about it, he could finally tell me what happened to Natalie that night, and I could stop lying awake imagining a thousand different scenarios that ended with three able-bodied men alive and well on the Splendour and my sister lying dead on the coast of Catalina.

But R. J. quickly made it apparent that not only did he want nothing to do with me, hed come to think of me as an enemy. I couldnt understand it. It hurt, a lot, and it only added to my confusion, so I went on trying to mend that fence and doing what I needed to do to care for my family.

Natalie was never, ever far from my mind. I circled around thoughts of not just how she died but also how she lived: countless memories of us together, some of them precious, some of them not so much; the times we laughed together; the times we cried together; the times we were mad at each other like sisters but loved each other too much to let it last; the times she was my hero, my protector... The realization kept hitting me over and over again that if the situation were reversed, if Id gone away for a weekend and not come back alive, she would never have tolerated not knowing. She would have moved heaven and earth to get to the bottom of what happened, for her own sake and for mine. I owed her the same, but I felt powerless, and on top of that, I didnt know where to begin.

Then one day, ten years after Natalie died, I got a phone call from out of nowhere that slowly but surely changed everything...

At this point, Ive lived for forty years without Natalie, which is more time than I got to have with her. Four decades of major life milestones, of happiness and sadness, and through it all Ive wished I could see her growing older beside me.

Now, in my seventies, I know that my traditional fallback positionmy go along to get along approach to lifewont suffice. For too many years I didnt feel I could get involved, out of fear that I had nothing to contribute, no way to break through the deafening tabloid noise. I was also terrified of the possible repercussions of digging deeper when everyone seemed to be saying there had been no foul play, that it truly was an accident.

Telling this story is the bravest thing I will ever do. Its the best way I can think of to honor Natalies legacy, tell the unvarnished story of our lives, and uncover the truth behind that fabled night on the Splendour.

I t was the night of November 28, 1981, and I couldnt sleep. I had this vague, icy feeling that something, somewhere, was wrong; I just had no idea what it was. So my mind was racing around all over the place trying to find that fire I needed to put out.

It couldnt have been my daughter, my only child, seven-year-old Evan. She had been sleepy and content when I put her to bed an hour ago.

Mom had been staying with us for a while, and she was okay when she went scuffing off to her room shortly after dinner. Shed been fairly fragile since Dad had died a year earlier. Then again, fragile had always been one of her comfort zones. Mom had a beautiful condo to live in for the rest of her life, compliments of my sister, Natalie. Natalie and I had been taking turns moving her in and out as she grew increasingly unstable and in need of support.

Money. Maybe that was it. God knows, Id lost plenty of sleep about money over the years. Six marriages, and not a single dime of alimony, ever. (Is there a word for the opposite of gold digger?) Now I was a single mom with a little girl to take care of, with an occasional $150 a month of child support from her father, Richard Smedley, which would have been plenty if Evan had been a goldfish. But he was living in Texas with a new wife and kids by then.

Id given up on my acting career, or my acting career had given up on me, after my last movie, a complete mess of a horror film called Dark Eyes, or Satans Mistress, or Demon Rage. (The producers kept changing the title, as if that were the problem.) Thanks to a lot of persistence, a lot of phone calls, and a lot of friends in show business, Id transitioned into a project development job for producer Ron Samuels, who was married to Lynda Carter, star of the hit Wonder Woman series. It was a good job, challenging and demanding. It was also a much-needed steady paycheck. So no, at least that night, it wasnt money that was keeping me awake with this awful sense of undefined dread.

It couldnt be Natalie. She was away for a weekend that sounded like a press agents dream headline: Natalie Wood, her husband (for the second time) Robert R. J. Wagner, and their guest Christopher Walken, Natalies costar in the almost completed film