Inside Natalie Wood

It's an odd passage to stumble across. Gavin Lambert's biography of Natalie Wood includes more or less an appeal from the Wagner family that Christopher Walken tell his version of what happened on board the boat that fatal weekend the actress drowned. Another lingering question is whether he and Wood actually had an affair.

"Only Walken … knows for certain what the flirtation led to, and whether he played an Iago-like role in provoking RJ's [Wood's husband Robert Wagner] jealously, or whether it was justified," Lambert writes.

According to his book, jealousy and excessive amounts of alcohol were the guest demons on the boat, stoking explosive scenes in the hours and days before Wood died off the coast of Catalina on Nov. 29, 1981.

Wood's life, and certainly her death at 43, were covered more sensationally in Suzanne Finstad's 2001 "Natasha." But Lambert had been close to Wood since she starred in the film of his novel "Inside Daisy Clover." While much of what he reveals has been told before, Lambert brings the perspective of a Hollywood insider and family intimate.

Wood (who grew up Natasha Gurdin) was stage-mothered as a child actor by a Russian émigré so histrionic and grasping it's easy to picture her with talons. But as a 15-year-old, Natalie launched herself in another direction, fighting for a role in "Rebel Without a Cause" opposite James Dean. Lambert also recounts how she carried on simultaneous affairs with the film's director, Nicholas Ray, and co-star Dennis Hopper.

Wood made the transition from screen moppet to glamorous movie star, but her career was a curious hybrid. She held title and court in old Hollywood, but craved a place in the grittier new school of serious filmmaking.

Her life-long love affair with the insistently debonair Wagner (whom she divorced, then remarried after a brief marriage to Richard Gregson) meant she really belonged to the world of Modern Screen magazine.

Lambert portrays Wood as desperate to reignite her career as she becomes middle-aged - in fact, she is desperate in general.

His respect for Wood's talent is genuinely expressed, but it is clear that in her 40s she masked her fear of being eclipsed by renewing her creative drive.

She threw herself into her role in "Brainstorm," and at her co-star Walken. Sleeping pills and alcohol became mainstays. Almost as intoxicating, Lambert writes, were Walken's lectures on "freedom and dedication to art."

Natalie Wood Photos


















Inside Natalie Wood

"Walken's voice was obviously the most persuasive for someone disturbed, overmedicated, and obviously attracted to him," Lambert writes. That was the state of affairs when the three boarded the boat on Thanksgiving weekend 1981. There's no little irony in dying torn between two men who represented the opposing Hollywood polarities that magnetized Wood throughout her life.

Gavin Lambert has written a sensitive account of the actress' life and death

Natalie Wood: A Life
By Gavin Lambert
Knopf, $25.95