This Day in Film History (Natalie Wood in Drowning Death)

Nov. 30, 1981— After a frantic search, the body of actress Natalie Wood was found early in the morning, near Catalina Island off the coast of Southern California, hours after a night of drinking and quarreling with husband Robert Wagner aboard his yacht.

That much is known and admitted, not only by Wagner but by the subject of his quarrel with his wife, Christopher Walken, her co-star in Brainstorm. A subsequent investigation determined that, after the fight, she had attempted to board the boat’s dinghy. 

What has become a bone of contention in the years since is how and why Wood came to be there when she had a lifelong fear of deep water.

Coroner Thomas Noguchi issued a report labeling Wood’s death an accident, with Wagner not held responsible. Three years ago, however, after recent news reports raised questions about how much the couple had fought and the nature of Wood’s injuries, the cause of death was changed to “drowning and other undetermined factors,” citing bruises that occurred before Wood entered the water.

Why has this tragedy continued to resonate over the years? It’s not just the elements of scandal—the rumored infidelity and murder—that cling to the event. Nor is it because of a promising career gone before it had barely begun, as with James Dean, River Phoenix and Heath Ledger.

I think Wood continues to fascinate people because she represented touchstones for people’s lives. Millions had watched her as a little girl in Miracle on 34^th Street. They had seen her as a teen in Rebel Without a Cause and Splendor in the Grass, sharing the struggles of adolescence with the boy she loved. They had witnessed her negotiate the terms of lifelong commitment to another human being in Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice. 

In short, they had watched her grow up, passing through the stages of life as they had done.

What they didn’t realize was that, like many of them, she was passing through another stage of life as well: being regarded as obsolescent—old—by the industry for which she worked. 

From all appearances, Wood remained as vibrant and glamorous as ever, as attested to by the photo accompanying this post, a still from Brainstorm. But Hollywood, even more back then than now, was cruel to aging actresses.

The last significant role Wood had played—adulterous soldier’s wife Karen Holmes in From Here to Eternity—had been two years before. As Nancy Collins noted in a Newsweek article five years ago, Wood had turned 43 in the same month that she had lost a role she desperately desired: the lead in Sophie’s Choice. It could not have escaped her notice that the actress who won the coveted (and ultimately Oscar-winning) part, Meryl Streep, was a full decade younger.

Wood, then, was at her most vulnerable when she began to act with Walken, caught up in the excitement of interacting with a Method-trained actor. 

Wagner admitted in his memoir Pieces of My Heart to suspicions that his wife might be carrying on “an emotional affair.” He was hardly delighted, then, when Wood invited the younger Walken aboard their boat. 

While Walken prudently walked away to avoid becoming caught up in the couple's fight, Wood and Wagner continued to argue until just before midnight, when she was reported to have gone up to the captain's cabin to sleep. Wagner reported her missing about an hour and a half later.

Last weekend, I saw Wagner appear on TCM with stepdaughter Natasha in a daylong tribute to Wood. He talked easily and happily about his wife's pride in making Inside Daisy Clover and Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice. Then he mentioned the film that would conclude the tribute: Brainstorm.

With Brainstorm on well after midnight, I wasn’t able to see how Wagner dealt with this awkward topic. 

Beyond mentioning that it was her last film, how could he have freely discussed why she had died during filming? 

How could he say that her death caused such a mess, involving the studio and the insurance company, that it would be two years before it was released? 

How could he tell viewers that the fight that occurred during filming had left young Natasha without her mother?

The name of the couple's luxury yacht, Splendour, referred, of course, to one of Wood's signature roles. But given the circumstances surrounding her death and how much it has haunted those who knew her, it might more aptly have been called the Misery.

Flashback, April 1980: The NYC Transit Strike With a Better Ending

New York City Mayor Ed Koch (pictured) averted the mess that hit his predecessor once removed, John V. Lindsay, when a 12-day strike by the Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 ended in April 1980.

It was not an unalloyed victory for Hizzoner—warnings were immediately issued about yawning deficits in transportation funding that could only be met with subway and fare increases, after all. 

But it was a far cry from January 1966, when a strike by the union on the very day Lindsay took office signaled to many that the forces of dysfunction were gathering in the city. 

And it was probably as good a settlement as could be reached, given the countervailing pressures among the major parties in the dispute: for Koch, a fear that a cave-in to union demands would undercut the city’s negotiating posture with other municipal unions, just as New York was emerging from insolvency; for New York Governor Hugh Carey, a desire to prevent massive disruption; and for John Lawe of the TWU, a hundred-member negotiating committee, many taking a hard-line stance.

As a student commuting from New Jersey to Columbia University, I found the strike to be enormously inconvenient. But I was able to stay with a friend in his dorm during the period, and felt, in fact, glad to put extra time in at my college paper and to enjoy the early spring days that begin what are, in many ways, the most wonderful time of the year on that urban campus.

In a small way, my experiences mirrored that of many of the city’s 5.4 million other commuters in how we managed to make accommodations to get through the crisis. That, no doubt, gave a stronger hand to Koch than Lindsay had.

In length, little separated the two work stoppages by public employees, since the one in 1966 lasted only a day beyond the later one. But there were four differences between the strikes that were crucial:

*Season. Fiery union head Michael J. Quill led his men out on January 1. Not only was this the time of year when everyone was returning from the holidays and were unlikely, because of snow and cold temperatures, to want to be outside, but the Lindsay administration had not even gotten used yet to the elementary routine of running the city. In contrast, in 1980, schools were off for several days because of the Passover / Easter break; other area transportation services helped to mitigate the inconvenience of the TWU strike; and the Koch administration had been in office a couple of years, giving them time to learn the levers of power.

*Personalities. The 1966 strike occurred in no small measure because of the two fire-and-ice figures at its center. The fire was supplied by Quill, who, over the prior three decades, had won the fierce allegiance of his union’s rank and file (including my grandfather) through wage gains that lifted their standards of living. Despite a reputation for radicalism indicated by his nickname “Red Mike,” he had secured many of these gains through canny dealings with Democratic mayors (e.g., agreeing to back Mayor William O’Dwyer’s desire for a fare increase in 1948 in return for a generous labor contract). The “ice” was supplied by the Republican Lindsay, who, coming into office, was intent on reining in what he saw as excessive giveaways to labor. The WASP, patrician-looking mayor “looked down on blue-collar workers,” admitted Edward Herlihy, who later served in his administration as a labor aide. Understandably, the mayor’s high-toned calls for the union to exercise “civic responsibility” endlessly enraged the Irish-born Quill, who intentionally mispronounced the name of the new occupant of Gracie Mansion as “Lindsley.” In contrast, while the TWU disliked Koch, the mayor also did not exhibit toward Lawe the condescension that fairly oozed from Lindsay toward Quill.

*Mood. The timing of the 1980 strike put a spring, so to speak, in many New Yorkers’ steps. They had survived just about anything thrown at them in the last five years—a brush with municipal bankruptcy, the Son of Sam serial killer panic, a blackout—and they were still standing. By comparison, a transit strike, called at a time when the weather was improving, was nothing. Many took to riding bikes to work; many women took to wearing sneakers on the way to the office, a fashion trend they continued when the dust settled. The newspapers took to printing photos of crowds crossing the Brooklyn Bridge on foot. Through it all, Koch did not so much play chief decision-maker (particularly at the start of the strike, he stepped back, allowing Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) head Richard Ravitch to take the lead in negotiations) as chief cheerleader. When a heckler accused him of being a strikebreaker, the mayor shot back, “And you’re a wacko!”—and countless numbers cheered his give-as-good-as-you-get style. Nearly a quarter century later, Koch laughingly told AP reporter Larry McShane that the strike was “the high point of my 12 years as mayor." The 1980 strike took place about 10 days after the start of spring, and it was about to turn warmer; the 1966 strike occurred a comparable time after the start of winter, and the climate, meteorological and otherwise, was about to worsen.

*Outcome. The 35,000 workers who walked off the job in 1980 had hoped to make up the ground they lost during the 1975 fiscal crisis—a desire that many might have been expected to sympathize with, except for the size and nature of the union’s opening demands-- a 30% wage hike and a new holiday to honor Quill. The Koch administration was still not pleased with the contract won by the TWU-- a 9% raise in the first year and 8% in the second year along with a cost-of-living adjustment—but it did win some productivity increases. In addition, the mayor insisted on levying stiff fines on the strikers for violating the Taylor Law. But Koch’s expressed ambivalence about the settlement at the time (“We won this strike in the streets, and the MTA lost it at the bargaining table") was still more positive than the general feeling after the ’66 strike. The $52 million provided by the Lindsay administration over two years might not seem bad at first glance today, but it represented twice the amount negotiated previously by Robert Wagner. Moreover, the pact opened the door to other union leaders, who would not be satisfied with anything less than what the TWU won. Over the following eight years, Lindsay would have to contend with strikes or sick-outs by the city’s police, teachers, bridge workers, sanitation workers, and firemen. To close the growing deficits, he would have to press for a new municipal income tax--along with a new commuter tax--that managed to simultaneously alienate two groups who could not normally agree on anything: business leaders and blue-collar workers.

This Day in Labor History (Triangle Factory Fire)

March 25, 1911—In the worst workplace disaster in New York City history before 9/11, a half-hour-long fire broke out near closing time at the Triangle Waist Company in Greenwich Village, leaving 146 dead. The outrage provoked by the incident led to action on long-unheeded calls for better fire-protection measures while launching a wave of social-welfare legislation and leaders who paved the way for the New Deal.

One of my memories of 9/11 is the photograph of the “Falling Man” hurtling toward death below to avoid being consumed by the fire raging inside the Twin Towers. Just such a sight—much less novel then—greeted many New Yorkers 97 years ago as they beheld one young woman after another jumping to her death out of the Asch Building near Washington Square.

All through elementary and secondary school, I heard nothing about this crucial event in American history. In fact, the first time I came across it was in the superlative chapter on Alfred E. Smith in Robert A. Caro’s biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker.

I would hope that modern texts remedy this problem, but I doubt it—kids nowadays are lucky they can figure out in which century the Civil War occurred. In certain ways, however, I believe that March 25, 1911 should be committed to memory as surely as July 4, 1776.

Both dates, in their ways, marked a movement away from heavy-handed control by an elite and toward greater freedom—in one case, for white American males of property; in the later one, for the economically oppressed laborer, frequently female and foreign-born.

So, if I were to design a syllabus to teach this event, what would I choose?

Well, I’d start with So Others Might Live, a fine account of New York’s Bravest by journalist-historian Terry Golway. The section on the Triangle fire is short—only a half-dozen pages—but they give an excellent précis for the conditions that led to the blaze and the Fire Department’s helpless anger in combating it.

It also discusses an Irish-American Cassandra, department head Edward Croker, a chief as blunt as he was fearless, who, for his repeated warnings about high-rise office and factory buildings, had to endure constant smearing by business interests for being the nephew of past Tammany Hall boss Richard Croker—until events proved him right.

After Golway’s history, I’d assign David Von Drehle’s Triangle: The Fire That Changed America, for a deeper understanding of the background, events and people involved in that day. Though the extent of the tragedy was unusual, the labor conditions that made it inevitable were anything but. Harassment for petty rule violations had sparked a massive waist-union strike only the year before, and at the time of the fire, a hundred accidents occurred in American workplaces every day.

But the Triangle sweatshop, Gotham’s largest blouse-making operation, requires a Dickens to evoke. Its 500 or more workers, mostly young Jewish and Italian women, crouched over their machines. Only the walls and floors met the owners’ claim that the building was fireproof; the fabric and other materials on the factory floor represented potential kindling.

Worse, the operations on the upper floors lay just beyond the reach of fire department ladders and doors were locked because of fears of employee theft. When the rickety fire escape collapsed, then, it meant certain death for the fire’s victims, 123 of whom were women.

The New York Times won the Pulitzer Prize for its “Portraits in Grief” after 9/11. On a somewhat smaller scale, facing heavier odds because of the distance of the years, Von Drehle was about to compile his own version of this for the Triangle victims, by combing through countless news articles and a long-lost transcript of the trial involving the factory owners (whose acquittal on manslaughter charges brought howls of execration on their heads).

Von Drehle’s account makes clear why the disaster was a landmark event in American immigrant and labor history, but it was also a watershed in American political and urban history. In particular, in the fallout from the tragedy, Tammany Hall—the same political machine that, only a decade before, successfully ran a mayoral candidate with the proud slogan, “To Hell With Reform”—at least partly redeemed its corrupt, largely inglorious history.

For this third phase of the event, Von Drehle should be read in combination with Caro. The indispensable man at the center of this phase was one of the great sphinxes of New York history, Tammany’s chieftain, Charles Murphy. Film buffs know Murphy in fictionalized form, as “Jim Gettys” in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, but in real life Murphy kept his own counsel as he shrewdly navigated the political shoals.

Now Murphy acted, giving the go-ahead to his Tammany lieutenants in the Albany state legislature, Al Smith and Robert F. Wagner, to investigate the blaze and what led up to it. Their work led to 25 workplace safety bills in 1912.

More important, that work helped stave off a socialist insurgency in the city (perhaps partly answering Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous question about why there was no socialism in the United States) and launched the careers of several illustrious figures: Smith, the governor whose tenure became a kind of laboratory for later New Deal legislation; Wagner, later a U.S. senator and proud patriarch of a line of politicians who figured in city history for nearly three-quarters of a century; and Frances Perkins, who later, as FDR’s Secretary of Labor, became the first female to serve in the Cabinet.