Natalie Wood: The Complete Biography, Finstad Suzanne

An ID Book Club Selection - Impressive, disturbing, and revelatory.--Variety

Natalie Wood has been hailed alongside Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor as one of the top three female movie stars in film history. We watched her mature on the movie screen before our eyes in classics such as Miracle on 34th Street, Rebel Without a Cause, Splendor in the Grass, and West Side Story. But the story of what she endured, of what her life was like when the doors of the soundstages closed, had long been obscured.

Based on years of astonishing research, Natalie Wood (previously published as Natasha) raises the curtain on Woods turbulent life. Award-winning author Suzanne Finstad conducted nearly four hundred interviews with Natalie Woods family, close friends, legendary costars, lovers, film crews, and virtually everyone connected to her death. Through these firsthand accounts, Finstad reconstructs a life of emotional abuse and exploitation, of unimaginable fame, great loneliness, and loss. She reveals painful truths in Woods complex relationships with James Dean, Frank Sinatra, Warren Beatty, and, of course, Robert Wagner.

Thirty years after Natalie Woods death, the L.A. Sheriffs Department reopened the investigation into her drowning using Finstads groundbreaking research and chilling, hour-by-hour timeline of that tumultuous weekend as evidence. Within a year, the L.A. Coroner changed Natalie Woods death certificate from Accidental Drowning to Drowning and Other Undetermined Factors. In 2018, the Los Angeles Sheriffs Department officially named Wagner a Person of Interest in Woods death.

In this updated edition, Finstad will share her explosive findings from the last two decades. With her unprecedented access to the LASDs Murder Book, ignored by the original investigators, and new witnesses who have never spoken publicly, Finstad uncovers what really happened to Natalie Wood on that fateful boating trip in 1981 with Wagner and Christopher Walken. She expands on intimate details from Woods unpublished memoir, which affirms her fear of drowning and the betrayal by Wagner that shattered their first marriage.