Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind

- I remember it was Sunday morning after Thanksgiving.

I was 11 years old,

and I had spent the night

at my best friend Tracy's house.

The clock radio went off and woke me up,

and I heard a news report say

my mom's body was found off the coast of Catalina.

The next thing I knew, my stepdad's driver

was there with our nanny, Willie Mae.

They had come to pick me up and take me home.

It had rained, and the streets were wet,

and I was asking, "Is Mommy okay?"

But they were just comforting me,

and they weren't really telling me what happened.

When I got home, I got into my mom's bed

and tried to comfort myself.

I said, "Maybe she just has a broken leg

or something like that."

Then my stepdad came back.

I went down the steps, and I could tell,

just when I looked at his face,

that something awful had happened.

The day my mom died, my entire world was shattered,

and our family has never been the same.

Since then, there's been so much speculation

and focus on how she died

that it's overshadowed her life's work

and who she was as a person.

I'm Natasha Gregson Wagner,

and my mom was Natalie Wood.

- Hello, Natalie. - Oh, hello again.

Please sit down. - Thank you.

How's the food?

- Best location food I ever ate.

- Well, I must say, you certainly seem

to thrive on it.

Well, I was brought up on it.

I've been eating lunch on the set

since I was four years old.

- That's correct. Natalie's a movie veteran.

Been in pictures since 1941. Is that correct?

That's right.

My original real name

was Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko.

Zakharenko was always being mispronounced.

It was very difficult, so my parents

changed their name to Gurdin,

and then that got mispronounced a lot,

so when I was five years old

and William Goetz put me into my first film,

he that that Gurdin was not a good name,

and at this point, I was being called Natasha,

which is really a nickname for Natalia,

so he chose Natalie, and then he chose Wood

in honor of his friend Sam Wood, the director.

So that's how I got named.

Oh, daisies on your coffeepot!

They're my favorite flower.

With Natalie Wood,

one of the most fascinating things about her is,

generations of people watched her grow up,

and so it was congruent

with what was happening with their own development.

- No, Mom. We haven't gone too far.

- When you're an adolescent, you're a very different person

than you were when you were five years old,

and she certainly was that but on steroids,

'cause she was a movie star.

Wish me luck!

I'm gonna make a noise in the world!

- The business she was in is a tough business,

and to survive in that business,

you had to have a tough side to you,

and so I think she had to develop that.

But it wasn't comfortable.

What she really wanted to do was to laugh and have fun

and just be a regular person.

But mainly, she had a big heart,

and that showed up in her work.

- You can't pinpoint what it is that draws you to a character.

You just suddenly say, "I know her.

I know that I can make her be real."

- People knew she was smart and incredibly well-organized,

and in a town where women were

not always respected,

not in their work and not socially,

she was an exception.

She knew how it should be lit,

she knew how the sound should be,

she knew how she should look,

and she sure knew how to give a great performance.

- I know this may come as a great big shock

to the both of you,

but underneath all this hair and skin

is a human girl

with all the regular things going for me,

and believe it or not,

I don't want to spend the rest of my life

married to a man who's doing me a big favor!

Primarily, I'm an actress, and I think that at the point

when you're a star,

mainly, I was thinking of the work,

not of the stardom that follows it.

I've enjoyed the part where you act,

where the red light goes on and the camera rolls

and you really can do your work,

and in the film business, there are so many other things

that enter into making it possible

for those moments

where you just are able to do your craft

without the interference of a lot of other things.

- I always knew that she was an actor,

but, you know, around the house,

my mom didn't wear a lot of makeup,

and she was very casual,

so I would look at her and think,

"What is--what's the big deal about you, lady?"

But then she and my stepdad would get dressed up,

and they would go out to dinner or something,

and she was amazing-looking.

But we weren't raised by someone

who seemed like a movie star at all.

All she just seemed was sort of larger than life

but not because she was famous,

more because she was just her.

- I was seven when she passed away,

and I feel like my memories of her

are just ever-evolving.

You know, there's her beautiful face

and her voice and her hands

and all those things that I remember.

But when I try to think of my mom now,

it's so hard; like, I will literally

come across a picture, and I'll just look at it,

and I'll look at it a little bit more, thinking,

"Is that really my mom?

How is it that she's my mom?"

I just have this famous mother,

and she's like this mythology character.

I--you know.

I hope one day, I'll get to a place

where I can really access the true feeling

that this was my mother, that I came from her

and that she was mine

for a short time, you know?

Like, I feel like

it's just been very hard to hold on to that.

I have two fathers.

My biological father is Richard Gregson.

I call him Daddy Gregson.

My stepfather is Robert Wagner,

who everyone calls RJ,

and I call him Daddy Wagner.

My mom was the one that started calling them

Daddy Gregson and Daddy Wagner

to clarify who was who in case people got confused.

And then it's just nicknames that have stuck.

From the age of two, I was primarily raised

by my Daddy Wagner,

and in all that time,

he treated me like his own blood.

So, Dad, I just want to say

that I'm really excited to talk to you about my mom...

Yes, I am too.

- And everything we've been through,

the highs and the lows,

how we've always stayed

connected through all of it.

I don't think there's a day

that has ever gone by in my life that

there hasn't been a moment

that I haven't thought about Natalie

and how much she meant to me

in my heart and in my soul.

We started so young.

To see her evolve over the years

into the woman that she was

was very special.

- How did you two meet? I want to hear both versions.

- Well, actually, when I was ten years old

and RJ was about 18, I guess,

when you were first under contract,

I remember walking down the hallway with my mother,

and I saw him, and I said to my mother,

"When I grow up, I wish that I could marry him."

- Did you really? - I really did.

- Did you really know that she...

Well, I didn't know it then.

It sure could've saved me a lot of trouble,

I'll tell you.

- Could I ask for your version of when you met?

- When I came into Natalie's life,

I was sort of a Happy Jack Squirrel kid,

you know, with nothing on my mind much but my hair

and...

She sort of resisted me a bit, actually,

at the beginning, because-- - I did?

- I was--yeah, well, I was so different

than all the rest of the-- - I don't remember that.

- Well, yes, you did, and then I finally started