‘This is the Splendour, needs help.” With those words, 51-year-old actor Robert Wagner and Dennis Davern, the captain of Splendour, sounded the alarm around 1:30 A.M., on November 29, 1981, that Wagner’s wife, Natalie Wood, had disappeared from the 60-foot yacht the couple owned.
Approximately six hours later, Wood’s body, clad in only a flannel nightgown, red down jacket, and blue wool socks, was found floating face down in the Pacific about a mile away, 200 yards off Blue Cavern Point on Catalina Island. Just to the south, Prince Valiant, the 13-foot inflatable dinghy belonging to Splendour, had washed up on the rocks, its ignition key switched to “off,” the gearshift in neutral, and the oars up in a locked position.
The death of the 43-year-old actress stunned Hollywood. “It’s hard to describe the horror of this thing,” said Fred Astaire, a family friend who had played the father of Wagner’s character from 1968 until 1970 in the popular television series It Takes a Thief. As both the Coroner’s Office and the Sheriff’s Department began to investigate, rumors and questions swirled in Hollywood: What had brought Wood, whose fear of deep water was legendary, to leave the yacht in the middle of a cold, starless night and board the dinghy?
“I’m afraid of water that is dark,” she had told a journalist just weeks before her death.
As the details of the weekend surfaced, the questions multiplied. Wood had invited the actor Christopher Walken, then 38, with whom she had been filming a science-fiction thriller, Brainstorm, to be her guest aboard Splendour over Thanksgiving weekend. The Wagners, accompanied by Walken and Davern, had sailed to Catalina Island, 22 miles off the California coast, leaving around noon on Friday, November 27.
They anchored off Avalon, the island’s main town, and went ashore for shopping and a few beers, leaving Davern behind. The following afternoon they sailed to Isthmus Cove, an isolated spot at the northern end of the island with a tiny community that caters to yachtsmen. They dined that evening at Doug’s Harbor Reef, the only restaurant on the cove. Some of the restaurant’s staff thought the Wagner party was drinking rather heavily and later remembered volatile behavior on Wood’s part. After the group departed, Don Whiting, the restaurant’s manager, warned Kurt Craig, the harbormaster, to keep an eye out for their safety. They boarded Valiant at about 10 and motored back to Splendour.
What happened next, aboard the yacht, has been a subject of continuing speculation and innuendo. What is definitely known is that Wood retired for the evening. Sometime later Wagner went to check on her and discovered that both she and the dinghy were missing.
A few days after the tragedy, John Payne and his girlfriend, Marilyn Wayne, a Los Angeles commodities broker, contacted police to say they had been sleeping aboard a boat, Capricorn, which was moored near Splendour that night.
Around midnight Payne heard a woman yelling, “Help me, someone please help me!” The voice was coming from near the stern of Splendour and, Payne believed, from someone in a dinghy. He awakened Wayne, who heard the cries, too. The couple claimed they hadn’t responded because a loud, drunken party raged on another nearby yacht, and they thought someone was just “playing around.”
Indeed, they had heard a man’s very drunken voice respond mockingly, “O.K., honey, we’ll get you.” They believed the voice belonged to someone at the party, which evidently reinforced their notion that the whole thing was a joke.
The public face in the ensuing investigations was that of Thomas Noguchi, chief medical examiner in the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office.
The autopsy revealed that Wood had died of drowning and that her body had “superficial skin bruises” on the arms and lower legs and a vertical abrasion on the left cheek, such as might have been caused by falling into the water. The toxicology report showed that her blood-alcohol level was at least .14 percent—.04 percent above the level used in California to determine intoxication in automobile drivers.
