For 27 years Robert Wagner, the Hollywood actor, has refused to discuss the night his wife and fellow film star Natalie Wood vanished from their yacht and drowned.

Now, at 78, Wagner is to break his silence in the hope of dispelling rumours that he was somehow responsible for the death of Wood, the Oscar-nominated actress he had married twice, or that she fell overboard as they partied drunkenly with another actor, Christopher Walken.

In a forthcoming autobiography, Pieces of My Heart, he admits for the first time that he was jealous of Walken, whose performances in The Deer Hunter and Pennies from Heaven had made him a rising star.

He says he felt his wife was being “emotionally unfaithful” to him on the set of Brainstorm, the film she was shooting with Walken.

According to Wagner’s account, tensions boiled over during a late dinner on the yacht, which was moored off the island of Santa Catalina, near Los Angeles, after Walken suggested that Wood should star in more films instead of caring for two young children.

Wagner lost his temper and, he admits, smashed a wine bottle on the table, prompting Wood to go below to their cabin. He says that when he put his head around the door of the cabin and saw his wife for the last time, she was fixing her hair and apparently preparing for bed.

He and Walken went up on deck to cool down. At about midnight he returned to the cabin and discovered that his wife was missing. Then he realised that the yacht’s dinghy had gone too. He searched for Wood on the yacht Splendor but in vain.

“Now he thinks that Natalie heard the dinghy banging loosely against the Splendor, went to fix it and slipped on the ‘swim step’, knocking herself unconscious, and rolled into the water, and the dinghy just floated away,” said a friend familiar with Wagner’s manuscript.

“There was no conspiracy, nobody walking in on something sexual, nothing absurd like that.”

The coastguard found the drifting dinghy a few hours later, the inquest into her death heard. Soon after that Wood’s body was spotted floating nearby.

The coroner found that Wood, a former child star whose best-known roles included Maria in West Side Story, had consumed seven or eight glasses of wine but was probably not drunk. He ruled that she had fallen into the water by accident and had been dragged down by her heavy clothing. She was 43.

Wagner’s friend added: “He writes that he went through the inquest in a daze and after that he took to his bed for eight days in a catatonic state, blaming himself for her death. He’s never entirely recovered, but how can you?”

One horrible irony of her death, revealed in the book, is that Wagner had helped his wife to overcome childhood phobia about water. She had once told Elia Kazan, the director of her 1961 hit Splendor in the Grass, that she needed an antianxiety pill to step over a puddle. Wagner persuaded her to sail by naming their yacht after that film, one of three for which she was nominated for an Oscar.

Yet Splendor in the Grass was a bittersweet memory, he now admits: during the filming his wife started an affair with Warren Beatty, her co-star, which destroyed their first marriage.

In the book Wagner confesses to hanging around Beatty’s house with a gun. He apparently hoped Beatty would come out on foot so that he could take a shot at him. Wagner started drinking heavily and brooding about suicide, but a friend talked him into psychoanalysis, which he credits with saving his life.

Like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie today, Wagner and Wood were regarded as Hollywood’s golden couple. After a brief courtship they married in 1957.

He was the star of a string of hit movies, including Titanic and Between Heaven and Hell. She had appeared with James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause.

After Wood and Wagner divorced in 1962, she claimed his obsession with golf had ruined their relationship. However, they could not stay apart.

In 1971 they spied one another across a restaurant and, shortly afterwards, Wood ended her marriage to a British film producer, Richard Gregson. In 1972 Wagner married her again on board their new toy, the Splendor.

Video: TV news death report of Natalie Wood, Nov 30 1981 (ABC News video)

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=TiOQiprMfDs&feature=related

Video: Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner tribute (series of early photos)

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=deX-cjZVQw0&feature=related

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