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Early on in HBO’s Natalie Wood documentary, Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind, Wood’s daughter notes that her mother’s tragic death has overshadowed the late actress’s life and career. Wood—who had an illustrious career that spanned from the little girl in Miracle on 34th Street to Maria in West Side Story—died at age 43 off the coast of Catalina Island, on November 29, 1981.
Natasha Gregson Wagner, Wood’s oldest daughter whom she had with producer Richard Gregson, produced the documentary that released on HBO on Tuesday night. The film features interviews with Wood’s other daughter, Courtney Wagner; friends of Wood’s including Mia Farrow, Robert Redford, and Mart Crowley; and most significantly, Robert “RJ” Wagner, Wood’s husband who was with her the night she died, and who was officially deemed a person of interest in the ongoing investigation of her death in 2018.
Directed by Laurent Bouzereau, who also did the 2017 documentary Five Came Back, Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind moves through both Wood’s personal relationships and career, using a mixture of archived photos and clips, and present-day talking-head interviews. And, despite Gregson Wagner’s observation at the beginning of the film, a significant portion of Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind does focus on her mother’s death, and particularly on disproving the accusation that Wagner might be responsible for Wood’s death.
Understandably, Gregson Wagner is upset by the accusations that her step-dad, whom she feels was an exceedingly loving husband and father, would ever be capable of such a crime. But according to Wagner, the accusations don’t bother him.
“I don’t pay very much attention to it, Natasha, because they’re not going to redefine me,” he tells Gregson Wagner in the film.
Fans of Wood will no doubt want to check the film out for themselves, but here are 9 big takeaways from Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind.
Natalie Wood was named by studio executive William Goetz when she was 5 years old.
“He chose Natalie, and he chose Wood in honor of his friend Sam Wood, the director. So that’s how I got named,” Wood said in an archived audio interview featured in the film. Wood was born Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko, to Russian-American immigrants.
Wood wrote an article for a ladies home journal in 1966 that was never published.
Wood’s eldest daughter, Natasha Gregson Wagner, read the article, which was titled “Public Property, Private Person,” aloud in the film. Wood spoke of her troubles in her first marriage to Robert Wagner.
“After two years of marriage, things began to change,” Wood wrote in the article. “We were aware that we had problems, but we tried to avoid the real conflicts. We maintained a superficially happy relationship and hoped that by pretending nothing was wrong, the problems would go away. How do you separate reality from illusion, when you’ve been trapped in make-believe all your life? Marriage requires patience and work, as well as capacity to accept another human being, flaws and all, without cloaking him in a smothering mantel of perfection.”
Of Wagner’s career lull, right at the very time that Wood’s career was taking off, Wood wrote, “Sometimes I waited for him to complain or start a fight, but his calm exterior remained intact. His coolness drove me frantic.”
Robert Redford was the best man at Wood's second wedding, to producer Richard Gregson.
“Richard Gregson was my agent,” Redford says in an interview for the film. “Right from the beginning, I saw him as a very smart, elegant guy. More so than any of the agents that I knew in Hollywood. And I was best man at their wedding!”
Wood locked Gregson out of the house when she found out he'd had an affair with her secretary.
Gregson, who died at the age of 89 last August, spoke candidly about his affair in his interview for Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind.
“Natalie found out, which was pretty inevitable, and I see her look at me, and in her eyes I see, ‘You son of a bitch.’ And then she threw everything out of the window,” Gregson said. “She had the police on guard for a week. She had a pretty good temper, I must say.”
Wood's personal assistant had her office in the corner Wood and Wagner's master bedroom.
“These two were in bed…” remembered Liz Applegate in an interview for the doc. “It was quite funny actually, to be in that situation having come from an office.”
Wood always wore a large bracelet to hide a flaw on one of her wrists.
Wood was self-conscious that one of her wrist bones was bigger than the other, which was a result of a wrist injury she sustained on the set of The Green Promise (1949) that never healed properly, according to her daughter, Natasha Gregson Wagner.
'Brainstorm' director Douglas Trumbull is certain Wood never had an affair with Christopher Walken.
The rumor that Wood and Walken had an affair has long circulated, given that it is now known Wagner and Walken were arguing on the night that Wood died. According to Douglas Trumbull, who directed Walken and Wood in the actor’s final role, this rumor has no basis.
“I found out in the shooting of [a sex scene] that there was almost no physical chemistry between them at all,” Trumbull said in an interview for the film. “That made me believe, in retrospect now, that the suggestion that there was a love triangle between Natalie, Christopher, and RJ is not true. I just think it’s impossible.”
Wood was nervous to go onto the boat with Wagner and Walken, a few nights before she died.
“She was anxious about going on the boat because she compromised,” said Joshua Donan, that stepson of Robert Wagner who lived with Wood and Wagner after college “She loved the life she had, and she loved the work. And she knew she couldn’t do both, fully. These two men represented both sides of that argument. Chris was, in her mind, a free spirit, an artist, and RJ was a responsible husband and father. I said to her that I thought it was important that she go on the boat, that it would give her an opportunity to work through all of this. Silly me.”
Wagner admitted he got violent with Walken the night that Wood died.
At the very end of the film, Wagner walks through the night Wood died for his step-daughter—a similar account from the one he gave in his 2008 book, Pieces of My Heart. Here’s what Wagner said about that night in the film:
“I remember I had a few glasses of vino and I was feeling pretty good. We came back to the boat. I opened up another bottle of wine and had a couple more glasses of wine. I sat there with Chris, and we started talking, and he started to mention to me about your mother—how wonderful she was, and what a great actress she was, and how he enjoyed working with her.
He said, ‘You know, I think it’s important that she works.’ I said, ‘I think it’s important you stay out of our lives.’ I got angry at that. So your mother went down below to our bedroom to get ready to go to bed and I sat there with Chris. I said ‘Don’t tell her what to do, and stay out of her life.’ I picked up the bottle and smashed it on the table. I was really angry about it. When I look back at it, unjustifiably so.
He ducked out, and went out on the top of the deck, and I followed him out there. I was still saying to him, ‘Just stay out of it Chris, don’t get involved in it, she’s got three children.’ I was also a little high at the time, I might say. But I calmed down.
We went back down below and talked for a while. He went to his cabin which was up in the other part of the boat. I had Dennis [Davern, the boat’s captain]—we swept up the glass on the floor and cleaned up the salon a bit. We talked about leaving the next day to go back to the mainland. Then I went below, and when I went below, she wasn’t there. I looked around, I looked in the bathroom, she wasn’t in the bathroom. And the dinghy was gone.”
According to Wagner, he called a shore boat to check for Wood at the restaurant where they’d had dinner, and when he didn’t find her, he called the shore patrol and the coast guard. This contradicts Davern’s account of the night, who has claimed that Wagner prevented Davern from calling for help after Wood went missing, and alleged in his 2014 memoir that Wagner pushed Wood off of the boat.
