Scrolling down Facebook on Thursday, in the midst of the endless posts about the health-care vote, was a desperate, heart-stopping entreaty from my friend, actress, and once-upon–a-time member of Hollywood royalty, Lana Wood.
It read:
A flurry of responses ensued—from earnest advice (“I would call the housing authority . . . I can’t believe someone can be evicted on such short notice”) to passionate support (“We are all here for you, Lana darling. We love you”) to doubts about the veracity of the post. (It was real.) Friends set up a GoFundMe page. Eventually, Lana herself popped in:
“Thank you Jill,” the 71-year-old actress said, responding to an acquaintance, “a voice of reason. I’m sorry I said anything . . . I was just falling apart!”
Decades ago, who would have expected this? I remember being an insecure young teenager in Beverly Hills, reading the “trades” and the movie magazines my mother edited, and seeing this exotic, decolletaged, Slavic-eyed beauty, barely older than I was—she was 15!—huddling at LaScala and other places in the neighborhood, with Jack Wrather Jr., her suave, slightly older boyfriend, the son of Lone Ranger and Lassie producer Jack Wrather Sr. She would marry him at the precocious age of 16.
Over the ensuing decades, Lana Wood had roles in several dozens movies and TV shows, including The Fugitive, Bonanza, Mission Impossible, and Starsky and Hutch. Her career may have benefited in part from her older sister’s fame and charisma and great likability, but she was a trouper: for a scene while filming “Bond Girl” Plenty O’Toole in 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever, she was submerged in a swimming pool with her feet loosely tied to a cement block; she came close to drowning. Lana would end up marrying five times (counting the first, annulled marriage), a quota more common in Old Hollywood, where people often had to get married, than of her own counterculture generation, when you could have just as many serial serious relationships without tying the knot. The number may have signaled how close she was to Natalie, eight years her senior and a liminal figure between Hollywood’s studio years and the 1960s. (A 10-year-old Lana can even be seen in The Searchers, playing the younger version of Natalie’s Debbie.)
A few years ago, Lana friended me on Facebook—a social equalizer on par with rehab and saunas. As I saw her post about happily going for dinner with her family to a restaurant on Los Angeles’s historic Olvera Street, I forgot about the sexy temptress of decades earlier. In her timeline, she seemed a buoyant, down-to-earth mom and grandmom in her 60s. She revealed nothing of her straitened circumstances. Facebook is great for that, too. Over the weekend, a mutual Facebook friend, who works in media, wrote to me that “I had been to her house . . . [and] I figured she was struggling for a while but very proud and perhaps didn’t want to beg for help.”
On Saturday I was able to get Lana on the phone. She had talked to no other members of the media. In the middle of the chaos of packing boxes, crying, and hugging her daughter and grandchildren, she told me, from her Ventura County house, “It’s pretty bad. The landlord wants us out—now—and we don’t have anywhere to go. We are a family of six. My daughter, Evan, who is 42, just got a return of the Hodgkin’s lymphoma she thought she'd beat, and she also has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease—C.O.P.D. When she walks, she walks around strapped to an oxygen machine. She has a wonderful husband who’s never missed a day of work in 20 years. But he doesn’t work for a big, moneyed company. They have three children—my crying teenage granddaughter is saying she doesn’t know what she’ll do if she doesn’t finish her year at her high school, and the two boys are saying: ‘We don’t want to go!’ to another school, either.”
Confronting her hectic packing, she said, “I’ve got seven years worth of accumulated books and CDs and nonsense. It’s a nightmare.”
“And now—being evicted—we have a black mark against us,” she said.
Lana and family took the house without a lease, on a month-to-month basis, a mistake in retrospect, but there didn’t seem to be much choice at the time, she said. They had previously been living in one rented house whose circumstances they didn’t know about, “and then one morning we awoke to find a ‘Foreclosure’ sign tacked to the front door; we had to get out.”
As for her own health, she was blunt.
“It sucks,” she said. “I’ve got high blood pressure, arthritis throughout my neck and spine and knees and hands and feet . . . I live with pain 24/7 . . . it’s nothing next to what my daughter goes through.”
Listening to her plight, it was hard not to think of her greatest sorrow: her sister’s death in a strange boating accident off Catalina Island in November 1981. The official story was that Natalie—ever afraid of the water—had, after an inebriated fight with her husband, Robert Wagner, lowered herself into a dinghy, and something went awry in the choppy waves and she had accidentally drowned. This was Natalie’s second go round at marriage with Wagner, the perfect-WASP leading man of the 1950s; their first lasted from 1957 to 1962. They had three daughters: hers from a previous marriage, his from a previous marriage, and the one they had together. Wagner and their friend Christopher Walken, who was also on the boat that night, were never fully interrogated. Drinking had certainly played a part. In his 2008 memoir, Wagner wrote that he and Walken had argued about Wood’s career that night, and that he smashed a wine bottle in the process. The authorities never looked too hard at it, despite the fact that movie stars were no longer getting the passes they had two or three or four decades prior.
I had become Facebook friends with Lana Wood around the time the investigation into her sister’s death was reopened in 2011—thanks in part to new reporting done by Sam Kashner and CBS News for a Vanity Fair Hollywood-themed episode of 48 Hours. I remember Lana’s poignant imprecations for justice. She wrote to the Los Angeles District Attorney, pleading for a more thorough inquiry. “Is there something I don’t understand?” she wrote in her neat, rounded script. “Why, year after year, is this man [Wagner] allowed his lies, allowed to move out of the state, allowed to refuse to meet and speak to the detectives continually! Ask yourself if an innocent man who has lost his wife is usually this reticent.” (Wagner has always denied culpability.) Furthermore, in 2013 , author Suzanne Finstad, whose excellent biography of Natalie, Natasha, was critically praised, revealed exclusive tape recordings of interviews she’d had with Lana in which Lana had asserted she’d been told a damning version of events from the ship’s captain. (The captain said he had not been entirely forthcoming with investigators in the original examination of the case.) Finstad’s proffer of the tapes did not advance the investigation toward further questioning of Wagner.
A few years following Natalie’s death, Lana’s career hit a lean patch. IMDB shows that she had roles in more than 50 movies or TV shows that aired between 1957 and 1985; then there was a 23 year-long work stoppage, finally ending with 13 projects from 2008 to the projected future. Her Facebook post had been sobering, and our conversation had only reinforced that feeling. Family members of Hollywood “royalty,” it would seem, are not immune to the prosaic hell of living paycheck-to-paycheck.
“I’m just wiped out—I’m just exhausted,” Lana said. I didn’t want to keep her on the phone any longer. I expressed my admiration for her fortitude before I hung up, but I had the feeling, from her realism and apparent strength, that she would prevail.
