I Read a Book and Get Retrospectively Creeped Out

Okay, so, yes, creepy.

I got stupid lost in the library again, this time looking for the oversized biography section, which is not, as it sounds, the section devoted to notable fat people.

I never did find the oversized section—never got near the B’s (for Bligh, William)—but a book in the W’s froze me.

I had a philosophy professor who liked to say there was nothing perfect in the world, no living Platonic ideal anywhere in the world--except Natalie Wood. And we always laughed. Because to have Natalie Wood show up in the middle of discussion on Plato’s pure forms blew up our notion of scholarly rigor. She appeared more than once in Jack Whitcraft’s lectures, always as the one indisputably pure and beautiful thing on the planet.

But Natalie’s shown up frequently on bookshelves in the last 10 years, and will no doubt show up more, as her various friends and husbands die off, and speculation flares anew on the circumstances of her death.

Wood drowned after apparently falling from the boat she owned with her husband, Robert Wagner, off Catalina Island in November, 1981. Also aboard was the actor Christopher Walken and Wagner’s hired captain.

Everyone had been drinking heavily that night, first on the boat, then on shore, then on the boat again. Around midnight Walken and Wagner got into a fiery argument and Natalie left them to go to bed. About an hour later, they couldn’t find her aboard, nor could they find the boat’s dinghy.

Those aboard first believed she’d taken the dinghy out for a ride, though upon consideration realized it was unlikely a drunk woman, who didn’t like the little boat anyway, would take such a jaunt on a dark, cold, windy night on rough seas. They called the Coast Guard.

Next morning searchers found the dinghy in a little cave on the rocky coast. And then they found her, about 100 yards away. She was suspended in the water beneath her red quilted jacket, which held some air and prevented her from sinking. Underneath the jacket she was wearing her nightgown. She hung in almost a standing position, head down, eyes open.

Of course the story exploded into a tale of scandal, conspiracy, cover-up. Wagner had thrown her overboard in a jealous convulsion for her attention to Walken. She had stumbled into a stateroom to surprise Wagner and Walken together. She possessed embarrassing information on both men, who staged a loud argument to mask their joint guilt in killing her. The forensic evidence supported none of this.

What probably happened, of course, was she fell overboard while adjusting the line holding the dinghy to the boat’s stern. Anyone familiar with boats knows you spend a large part of your night quashing this or that little noise so you can sleep. Night-time dinghy bumping is the number one cause of insanity among boat owners. And that particular dinghy had a history of bumping.

She was probably shortening the line when she fell in, probably held on to the little boat as long as she could, and then succumbed to hypothermia. A very sad story.

Well, it never occurred to me while sailing off Catalina that I might visit the spot of a notorious death. I had heard Wood’s name in connection with Catalina, when I worked in California; had heard she drowned somewhere around there. But it wasn’t until I opened her biography today that I knew exactly where.

Indeed, there in vivid description was Two Harbors, a place I know well, a ramshackle outpost on far side of the island that then, as now, contains only one restaurant. It was where she ate her last meal. And there was the description of the anchorage where they had moored their big boat, exactly where Exy and Irving always anchor to give the kids a swim.

There in description was the little dock I knew, where they had pulled her out. And there in a photograph was the very cave I had kayaked through with my kids, a long tunnel open to the ocean at both ends that always got them enthused. It was in this cave they found the dinghy.

So in other words we had all been playing right where she died. We’d been swimming where her body spent a night almost floating.

I’m glad I didn’t know this then. I wish I didn’t know it now. But it only goes to show you, don’t go into the library without a deliberate plan.

It reminds me of the time that the great David Vis and I climbed to the top of a hilltop village in Spain, only to find that what looked like Moorish fortress was in fact a great crypt, which, furthermore, had—

No, skip that. I’m creeped enough for the time being. Maybe one day all these macabre stories from the road will go into a book and I’ll be finished with them (possible title, “Travels With Ghoulie” --apologies to John Steinbeck and his dog.) Until then I want to concentrate on the living.