Natalie Wood’s Dark Secrets: How Her Mother Acted ‘Inappropriately’ to Help Boost Her Career

She lived a too brief but brilliant life and not a day goes by when her loved ones don’t think of Natalie Wood. “She was really funny and she was fierce and she was happy,” her daughter Courtney Wagner says. “That’s how I remember her.”

Born Natasha Zakharenko to Russian immigrants living in San Francisco, Natalie was groomed for stardom from birth. “Our mother was born in Russia but she was raised in China from the age of 5,” says Lana Wood, Natalie’s younger sister, who explains that their mother strongly believed in prophecies she was given as a young woman. “The gypsy said she would have a child that would be known all over the world and that somebody was going to die from drowning. So my mom used to tell us that to keep us away from the water.”

A superstitious woman with a forceful personality, Maria Zakharenko “almost willed” Natalie to stardom, Suzanne Finstad, author of Natalie Wood: The Complete Biography tells Closer. “She was groomed by her mom to succeed at all costs, to be a pleaser, to do whatever directors and producers, even costars, wanted her to do.”

Natalie admitted she was from a generation who didn’t question authority. “I saw my parents as gods whose every wish must be obeyed or I would suffer the penalty of guilt and anguish,” Natalie said.

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The first prophecy came true very quickly. Natalie made her acting debut at age 4. She went on to steal scenes from Orson Welles in 1946’s Tomorrow Is Forever. By age 8, she’d become a household name as the little girl who doubts the existence of Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street.

“My mother was very caught up in the business with Natalie,” Lana tells Closer. “Even when she turned 18, my mom was still running the show.”

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Natalie’s mother believed in success at any price — including her daughter’s innocence. “Her mother brought her over to Frank Sinatra’s house, basically bartering Natalie’s virginity to try to help her career,” says Finstad. “It was inappropriate but it became a lifelong, almost paternal relationship. Natalie’s own father had a drinking problem and was very emasculated by her mother. Frank became very protective of Natalie.”

The singer’s affection wasn’t enough to save Natalie from other traumas and humiliations. “She was raped by a famous star when she was 15,” says Finstad. “When she was 16, the director of Rebel Without a Cause manipulated her into having sex with him by saying he wasn’t convinced that she would realistically play a bad girl.”

Lana, who named Kirk Douglas as the star who abused Natalie in her book Little Sister: My Investigation Into the Mysterious Death of Natalie Wood, says Natalie talked about the rape years later. “I think it affected her general feeling of what is right and wrong,” says Lana. “I think it made her more weary than she should have been.”

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By 18, Natalie was living the glamorous life of Hollywood’s biggest star. She had made the transition from child to adult actor and been nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role in Rebel Without a Cause. Gossip columns linked her romantically with James Dean, Elvis Presley and Elizabeth Taylor’s ex, Nicky Hilton.

But happiness eluded Natalie until she learned to deal with the terrible secrets she carried. “An actor named Scott Marlowe introduced Natalie to Freud,” says Finstad. “He helped open up her eyes about her mother’s really twisted manipulation of her.”

Natalie became an early proponent of therapy. “She was in therapy every single day,” says Finstad, who notes that the actress even turned down the role of Bonnie Parker in 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde “because she couldn’t be separated from her therapist” to film on location.

Lana explains that Natalie took her search for clarity seriously. “Natalie was trying very hard to understand herself and others better, and hopefully to change some things that she was not happy with.”

Natalie’s career continued to rise through the 1960s with Splendor in the Grass, West Side Story and Gypsy, but the joy she felt when she became a mother for the first time brought Natalie true contentment. “I never knew motherhood could be so gratifying until I had Natasha,” she gushed.

Although Natalie wasn’t domestic and couldn’t cook, she poured her love into her children — Natasha, from her marriage to Richard Gregson; Courtney Wagner, whose father is Robert Wagner, and his daughter, Katie Wagner, who Natalie thought of as a daughter.

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“For my mother, having children was a do-over, a chance to raise us in a way she wished she had been raised, to give her daughters the childhood that she had missed,” wrote Natasha Gregson Wagner in her 2020 book More Than Love: An Intimate Portrait of My Mother, Natalie Wood.

By 1981, Natalie seemed to have found peace in her personal life and a renewed interest in acting. Production on her final film, 1983’s Brainstorm, was nearly done when she drowned off the coast of Catalina Island, allegedly fulfilling the prophecy her mother once used to scare her.

But her daughter Natasha brushes off talk of superstition and conspiracies surrounding her mother’s death. “My mother was not a tragic, doomed person,” she says. “Her life was devoted to her art, her children, her husband and her heart. This is how she would want to be remembered, not as someone who is defined by her death, but by her life.”