Robert Wagner tells of Natalie Wood’s death

The actor Robert Wagner has broken his 27-year silence about the
circumstances surrounding the drowning of his wife Natalie Wood (pictured with Wagner in 1976), the Oscar-nominated actress best known for playing Maria in West Side Story. Since her death, Wagner, 78, has had to endure persistent rumours that he was somehow responsible, the most common being that she fell overboard after he and his wife partied drunkenly with another actor, Christopher Walken.

In a forthcoming autobiography, Pieces of My Heart, Wagner admits for the first time that he was jealous of Walken and that he felt his wife was being "emotionally unfaithful" to him on the set of Brainstorm, the film she was shooting with Walken at the time. According to Wagner, tensions came to the boil during a late dinner on the couple's yacht Splendor, which was moored off the island of Santa Catalina, near Los Angeles, after Walken suggested that Wood should star in more films instead of caring for two young children.

Wagner admits he lost his temper over the remark and smashed a wine bottle on the table, prompting Wood to go below to their cabin. He and Walken then went up on deck to cool down. At about midnight he returned to the cabin and discovered that his wife was missing. Then he realised that the yacht's dinghy had gone too.

The Sunday Times quotes a friend of Wagner’s saying: "He thinks that
Natalie heard the dinghy banging loosely against the Splendor, went to fix it and slipped on the 'swim step', knocking herself unconscious, and rolled into the water, and the dinghy just floated away. There was no conspiracy, nobody walking in on something sexual, nothing absurd like that."

The coastguard found the drifting dinghy a few hours later, and soon after that Wood's body was spotted floating nearby. The coroner found that Wood, who was 43, had drunk seven or eight glasses of wine but was probably not drunk. He ruled that she had fallen into the water by accident and had been dragged down by her heavy clothing. Adds Wagner's friend: "He writes that he went through the inquest in a daze and after that he took to his bed for eight days in a catatonic state, blaming himself for her death. He's never entirely recovered, but how can you?"