Can't tell you thrilled I am that they're re-opening the Natalie Wood case and it is being investigated as a homicide. As many of you know, I am mildly obsessed with this case. Not much additional info was shared at the press conference this conference. They said Robert Wagner is not a suspect. But...
Do the math. There were only three other people on that boat. RJ, Christopher Walken, and the captain. So unless there was a mermaid in the area I don't know who else they'd be investigating. And the captain is the one who has come forward with this new "information". You also have to figure that if they're re-opening the case after 30 years that they've got to have
some pretty substantial evidence.
Anyway, for more updates on this, watch your favorite news source (I imagine FOX News is claiming that Obama did it) or wait until next week when LAW & ORDER has their version of the case.
Hollywood never gave Natalie an Oscar. They should at least give her this.
38 comments :
Ooh, a Law & Order with Robert Vaughn as Robert Wagner and Christopher Walken as himself (he'll say yes to anything) if they do it as a cold case; Rob Lowe as Wagner and Jay Mohr as Walken if they solve it contemporaneously.
Adam Schiff: "You're going to take this case to trial with no physical evidence and the thirty-year-old testimony of a man who might well be a co-conspirator?!?!"
Jack McCoy: "The evidence was enough to get an indictment!"
Adam Schiff: "You could indict a ham sandwich!"
The captain was on "The Today Show" this morning, and he came off as shifty as heck. Here's how the interview seemed to go off (I admit I was only half-listening to the TV at the time): He said this "new information," which comes three decades after the fact and apparently corresponds with a book he's selling, is a claim that Wagner didn't try very hard to locate Wood when she went missing. (He said he wasn't claiming that Wagner had anything to do with her falling off the boat.)
But as the captain, wouldn't it have been HIS responsibility to do everything possible to find a passenger who might have fallen overboard? He said he had been kind of messed up personally at the time, but that doesn't explain why he would have just left her out there (even if his celebrity passengers told him to, which there's no evidence of anyway).
Maybe there's some real new information apart from this -- I don't know why they would have reopened the investigation otherwise. But I didn't get the impression that anything this guy had to say would be helpful at this point.
Ken, soon as I heard the news, I thought of you. They might as well have called her Natalie Wood Levine.
Man, she was gorgeous. Her family seem very keen to get the case reopened, I hope they get some satisfactory answers at least.
Ok, Ken, if you're going to get political about it ("I imagine FOX News is claiming that Obama did it"), then at least be fair and say the rest of the media is going to claim Bush did it.
Shall we guess the odds that someone who titles a blog post about this "Justice for Natalie Wood" would accept it if the investigators come to the conclusion that homicide can be ruled out?
Anyone else here see Brainstorm (the movie she was working on with Walken at the time) when it was finally released two years later? Do you think it might have been a success had she lived?
(The original release had one important element not reproducible in home video: The focus of the plot was an invention that could record a person's experiences so that another person could re-experience them as his or her own; for all playback scenes the aspect ratio changed and the picture became much wider.)
I'm cynical about this new investigation being announced to coincide with release of a book about the case. And to coincide with the 50th anniversary re-release of WEST SIDE STORY.
I must say I'm mystified (just as surely as I am by the spelling of that word). First, I think Captain of the boat is perhaps guilty of 'seeding' the climate, in anticipation of his new book on the subject being released soon (God, writers are so mercenary). Yes, it's always smacked of something wicked: Natalie hated dark water: she was dressed in fluffy slippers and a down jacket? She also sported multiple bruises...Not too many suspects, either. I'm not sure 'justice for Natalie Wood' is possible now, however...Maybe justice is in allowing Wagner, my pick for the perp.to continue selling reverse mortgages on TV.
I never understood how if a person was scared to death of the water, as Natalie Wood was, why would she get into a raft with a nightgown on. None of it ever made any sense and still doesn't all these 30 years later. I didn't see the interview of the captain but even that is questionable.
Don't see how they can say he pushed her overboard when they found the dingy near her body. He may have been a drunken, raving, abusive jerk that she tried to get away from, but that's not the same thing as committing murder.
I'm working my way through the book but it's all fairly melodramatic and the captain comes off as quite histrionic. 30 years is an awfully long time to stay quiet. It doesn't say much for his character.
This whole thing seems odd. I don't see how this evidence could possibly be "substantial."
My guess is that Wagner was so drunk he doesn't even remember what happened. Talk about The Morning After.
Sheila, I can't let that remark about the media and Bush/Obama pass. Fox regularly makes false, outlandish claims regarding Pres. Obama. There's a link to some behind my name above.
The regular news madia were not in the habit of claiming that Bush did things he didn't do.
This false equivalence stuff is a standard right wing tactic, and I couldn't let it sit there unchallenged.
I won't post again in this thread - sorry to have made the thread more political.
Ha Ha Ha! Sure, Sheila, that darn ol' corporate media SURE WAS tough on W, weren't they? All those calls for prosecution for lying repeatedly to justify torture and mass murder? All those burning cross-examinations when his book came out about why he ignored numerous specific warnings about an imminent attack? And what was with those rigorous investigations of the massive voter fraud during the 2000 and 2004 elections?
Hoo boy.
Mr. Schryver is quite right, a shining example of false balance.
They have said that there are 'witnesses' coming forward. I wonder why no one ever mentions Walken as a witness. They didn't mention him today. There was the sea captain, Wagner's statement, and silence from and about Walken.
I had the biggest crush on Natalie Wood and always smelled a rat on this one. Wonders why the Capt. waited 30 years to come forward. Oh wait, he's a Penn State grad.
This is pretty silly, really. Conspiracy theorists love their fun, but it's not hard to figure out what happened here: Wood got drunk, got the idea to row back to shore, took a spill and drowned.
Here's a friday question: Why do on some shows the creator writes some episodes every season and on others they just write the pilot and maybe the finale? (Assuming they don't leave the show for all its run).
i too saw the captain on Today. he's not even drek, yet i could smell his stench thru the tv.
i'm guessing rj might have done some sort of conspiracy thing like, "let's all get our stories straight."
Mike, can you give three examples of the "false, outlandish" claims that Fox "regularly" makes about President Obama?
Didn't think so.
What's the opposite of Christopher Reeve?
Christopher Walken
Vidor's succinct summary is correct and is borne out by the findings of the coroner, Thomas Nagouchi. This investigation will go nowhere.
As the tree, so the fruit
Publicity for his new book - which is 30 years too late. The man didn't have a conscious 30 years ago [if in fact something untoward happened] why would he grow one now? Oh, that's right...the almighty cash-in. Sickening.
They were all roaring drunk - if anything she drowned by accident. Even people deathly afraid of water will make poor choices when their blood alcohol content is quite a bit past the legal limit.
I wish they would let it rest. There is no need for "Justice for Natalie Wood" because it is absolutely within the realm of possibility/fact she drowned because she was drunk.
Sorry Ken. I really like you & your blog, but this is just such a non story.
It does sound like something someone would say long after the fact to get publicity/attention....much like the claim of former child star Corey Feldman that a "Hollywood Jewish Mafia" regularly molested young actors for decades.
Got him some face time on NIGHTLINE, adding a few more seconds to his 15 minutes...still, given only the two choices, it's better than what his partner in the original bromance, Corey Haim, did--kill himself in despair over fame long gone and never returning.
I just read that the book came out TWO years ago!
Chris, here's a link to help you see how Fox lies about Obama. But it's tough to narrow down Fox's lies, because they lie about EVERYTHING.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=fox+news+lies+about+obama&oq=fox+news+lies+about+obama&aq=f&aqi=g1&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=2636l2636l0l3141l1l1l0l0l0l0l170l170l0.1l1l0
Some years back, I read Gavin Lambert's biography of Natalie Wood (they became friends when she starred in the film version of his novel Inside Daisy Clover, which is flawed but a lot more interesting than Pauline Kael's review would lead you to believe). At any rate, he says she got into the little dinghy tied up to her yacht not to row to shore, but to try and re-position it so that it didn't bang against the wall of the cabin she shared with her husband, which was keeping her awake. As "Let It Rest" pointed out, a certain amount of drinking had been going on, and alcohol might have helped her overcome her fear of getting into a little boat in the middle of the night. (Her fear of water was well-earned--she had almost drowned in an on-set accident early in her career.)
Mind you, all of this is apparently based on what Wagner, who was also a friend of Lambert's, told him about the night in question, and it doesn't really explain how she wound up a fair distance from the boat, drowned, but I don't know what happened personally, and their may be a perfectly innocent explanation for what happened. It would have been nice if they had nailed things down more firmly the first time around.
(BTW, one of the best reasons to read Lambert's book is all of the material on the life of her parents--it's the story of how California became the home of a whole community of Russian refugees in the wake of the 1917 revolution.)
I was not suspicious but after reading Christopher Walken's 1997 version of what he 'thinks'may have happened...very Hinky ?
http://steelmagnolia-beautifulideas.blogspot.com/2011/11/nataliewood-christopher-walken-theory.html
Wonder if the Marilyn Monroe case will be reopened now.
I can't help but think that the reopening of this was spurred in part by the revelations at Penn State, where officials in compliance were with the misgivings were fired and face charges.
Off Topic but there are those in England trying to get justice for a three year old child, I hope they do not have to wait 30 years for a group of doctors to break their silence and find out who the paedophile is ?
Rupert Murdoch and the British Goverment are behind the cover-up
http://themurdochempireanditsnestofvipers.blogspot.com/2011/11/hackgate-leveson-vodaphone-robert-murat.html
The most amazing thing about this is that there's enough new evidence to re-open the case. Forget about the captain, I'd be interested in what the police have to say.
That said, they also "re-opened" the Kurt Cobain case (little know fact) based on the noise that a Private Investigator was making... So it may just be a police PR stunt to make sure they're not caught unaware by any press inquiries.
Until they make an arrest, it's probably nothing. Sorry, Ken.
Mike, can you give three examples of the "false, outlandish" claims that Fox "regularly" makes about President Obama?
Didn't think so.
Off the top of my head:
a) That Obama was born in Kenya.
b) That Obama is a Muslim.
c) That Obama is a Socialist.
And that's before I get to the neoliberal ideology that trashed the economy.
All the conspiracy kids are picking Wagner or Walken as the "killer." If I were a conspiracist I'd lean toward the Captain as my main suspect. He had a thing for Natalie and has by his own admission a guilty conscience.
BUT
I'm NOT a conspiracist. Instead I tilt in the direction of Natalie Wood was drunk, angry, and wanted off that boat in a bad, bad way... This leads me to the inevitable conclusion that she was just intoxicated enough to do something she feared (that dark water) and ventured off into the night only to drown and be bruised up by a fall, the pounding of waves, and maybe bouncing off a rock or two.
No mystery, just a series of unfortunate evnts.
Hey, look! Walker's Law: Every subject on the internet can be made into a partisan issue.
In an alcohol-fueled lovers' quarrel, everyone does stupid, melodramatic, reckless and often truly unforgivable stuff that they later regret.
Please don't ask me how I know.
Lisa
P.S. If one or more actors is involved, this goes double.
Also, Chris, to help you along, there's always:
He's spending the country into oblivion.
'Death Panels'
He wants to give free health care to immigrants.
Justice in this case="they got it right the first time"
http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20560474,00.html?xid=rss-fullcontent
So still no justice for Natalie Wood! I didn't expect much and I guess I was right. Was Mr. Wagner even questioned again for his odd behaviour on the night his wife "disappeared"? What can I say? Sad situation! Natalie deserves better.
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