Robert Wagner Says Daughter Natasha ‘Knows I By no blueprint Would Like Achieved The rest to Distress Her Mom’
“That night time has gone thru my ideas so time and all over again,” Robert Wagner says of Natalie Wood’s loss of life
As soon as she reached her 40s and turned into a mother herself, Natasha Gregson Wagner had a newfound want to rediscover her mother Natalie Wood — and give protection to her legacy.
Half of that used to be addressing the mystery of how she ended up within the waters off of Catalina Island within the early morning hours of Nov. 29, 1981, and addressing the painful hypothesis that Wood’s husband, Robert Wagner, the one that raised her and her sisters Katie and Courtney, had did not save his spouse and bore some roughly responsibility.
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It’s a discipline Natasha, 49, examines in her memoir More Than Cherish, excerpted within the fresh discipline of PEOPLE, and the HBO documentary Natalie Wood: What Remains In the back of, airing Would possibly per chance perchance furthermore 5.
“For thus a long time we were educated to overlook or not focus on about it,” says Natasha. (Her biological father used to be Natalie’s 2d husband, Richard Gregson, and he or she calls both men her dad.) “However enough is enough. I do know that if my mother had been in any roughly damage, he would own given his existence for her.”
“It’s true,” Wagner, 90, says in a rare interview. “She said that because she is aware of me and he or she is aware of that I never would own done anything else to anguish her mother.”
In the documentary, Natasha asks her father to characterize what occurred that night time on their yacht, the Splendour, after he, Wood and actor Christopher Walken returned to the boat following a dinner offshore the keep they’d all been ingesting. He recounts the argument he and Walken had over how mighty Wood must light work, during which she went below deck to mattress.
When Wagner went to seem her, he saw that both the dinghy and Wood were gone. “Nobody heard anything else,” he tells his daughter.
As they both fight back tears, he recounts the moment he used to be told they’d realized her body. “That night time has gone thru my ideas so time and all over again,” he says.
“If he hadn’t been in a arrangement to switch there, we don’t own made the movie,” says Natasha.
She acknowledges she’ll never know with “total sure wager” exactly how her mother ended up within the water because she used to be alone when she died. “It used to be a hideous, hideous accident,” she writes, “and the superb aspect responsible used to be too mighty alcohol that night time.”
She hopes with both projects, the focal level will now return to her mother’s existence and work.
“Natasha really wished to focal level, not how Natalie left us, but how she lived,” says Wagner. “And I mediate she captured that. It used to be a really very prolonged time coming and I’m so pleased along with her. Believe me, it wasn’t easy. It used to be something in her heart and soul that she wished to assemble.”
“The Natalie Wood legend is the legend of Hollywood and the motion photographs and the golden age of cinema,” says Laurent Bouzereau, who directed the documentary, “but really, it’s the legend of a family.”
Natalie Wood: What Remains In the back of will premiere Tuesday, Would possibly per chance perchance furthermore 5 at 9 p.m. ET/PT, exclusively on HBO.
