Natalie Wood’s grieving daughter

Natalie Wood’s daughter was just 11 when she heard on the radio that her mother had died, says Katherine Rosman in The New York Times. Natasha Gregson Wagner was at a sleepover when she woke up to a bulletin that the Hollywood star had drowned off the coast of Catalina Island, Calif. “‘Is this real? Is this really what’s happening?’” she recalls herself asking. She rushed home and found the adults in a state of shock. “My dad was just in bed, not able to function at all. My mom’s three best friends. Our nanny. It was kind of like a Fellini movie with people coming in and out.” Now 45, Gregson Wagner spent almost two decades trying to come to terms with the sudden loss of her impossibly charismatic mother. “I was in therapy from, like, the minute she died until I was 30.” That process was complicated by the conspiracy theories over the drowning; Gregson Wagner’s aunt has openly accused Wood’s widower, Robert Wagner, of having had something to do with her death. “It’s so preposterous that I can’t even relate to it,” says Gregson Wagner. “I know that she drowned and I know it was an accident. The details don’t concern me. The result is the same. She died. She left when I was 11 and my sister was 7, and we needed her.”