What Wagner told NY Post Columnist Cindy Adams about the night Natalie Wood drowned.

Cindy Adams of the New York Post (October 8, 2008) asked Wagner why he wrote a book.


“I’ve been fortunate,” he said. “There were so many in my heart that I just wanted to acknowledge them. It wasn’t easy to do. It’s been three years in the making. The whole experience was emotional.

“You stop and think about everything. Fortunately, I kept old phone books and lots of stills, so I could at least recall people’s names. Look, you see the time going. I’m doing my job 60 years. Someone said the other day they’d seen me with Susan Hayward in ‘A Song in My Heart.’ That was 1952.”

Reprising his Natalie Wood years was painful. The storybook marriage of two movie stars, the troubles, their divorce, a remarriage, that tragic end—after a night of drinking and arguing at sea, she famously fell to her death from their yacht Splendour.

“I couldn’t do an autobiography without touching that, but it was tough to bring her back. We met when she was 8 years old. I wanted to tell how happy we were . . . as for what happened that night she died, Chris Walken, who was with us, has gone over and over it with me. Did either of us ever hear anything? . . . It’s now 27 years later, and I’ve relived it a million times in my head. Maybe even more. I constantly second-guess myself. If I’d been there at that moment. I was responsible for her. I was always there for her. I wasn’t there then.