Murder
Happy Valley and Natalie Wood was def killed by Robert Wagner
Happy Valley (2014-2022) is a soon to be three season British crime drama, focusing on the life of hardscrabble police sergeant Catherine Cawood. It takes place in a nameless town in West Yorkshire, a middle of nowhere, nothing special kind of a place where the big man in town is a guy who owns a refrigeration business and everything else is in a drug ridden post-industrial decline. It is 1000% the inspiration for Mare of Easttown if you enjoyed that, and twice as bleak! Catherine Cawood wanders through season one sporting various wounds, barking away the concern of anyone who mentions it. “It’s work,” she tells them. A lot of the story involves a sadistic misogynist rapist loser who Catherine believes caused the suicide of her daughter, Becky, (I haven’t seen S2 but my guess is there’s more to this story) and who just got out of jail after eight years for drug charges. Catherine incisively describes why she knows he’ll come straight back to their shit hole town after he gets out of jail as, “he’s the type of person who thinks going to Manchester is a holiday abroad.” Catherine has spent the time he’s been in jail raising Becky’s son along with the help of her recovered heroin addict sister.
Because Becky’s son is believed to be the child of rape, and that rape the cause of Becky’s suicide, Catherine’s family has been torn apart by her decision to raise her grandson and not turn him over to social services. Her ex-husband and son both refer to him as “that thing” or “it” as if they cannot acknowledge he is even a person, falling silent when he walks in a room, and unfairly blaming him for all that has happened— the end of their family. The child himself is troubled, an innocent at the centre of a maelstrom not of his making, who can sense the wrongness of things without being able to articulate it and so throws tantrums and acts out at school. There’s times in the series it seems no one in the world actually wants this kid and everyone sees him as a burden. It’s very honest but difficult to watch. It’s clear no one has truly been able to move on from the death of Becky or to process what happened to them, outside of some surface attempts, over the last eight years. Catherine at one point gives an angry speech about what it is like to have a child die that made the hair on my arms rise it was so effecting.
This is a show about grief and horrible every day things and the shitty people and corrupt systems like an unstoppable wave drowning anyone who wants to do any good on this earth. I love the irony of the title, Happy Valley indeed. I was completely sucked into this story. I think because of it’s unpolished, unapologetic interfacing with the normal, but also unthinkable, tragedies of daily life. There is quite a lot of sexual assault and violence in it so be forewarned. S1 is from 2014 and has a kind of dated take on marijuana, which, while I don’t personally subscribe to the view of weed as some kind of panacea to heal the world, I think at times it seemed a little too aghast over cannabis. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to spend some time in the dark, the actress who plays Catherine Cawood gives an incredible performance.
Well, I finished the epic Natalie Wood biography. I can say, without a doubt, it was one of the saddest, most sordid things I’ve ever read. The final section, Dark Water and the updated afterward by the author had my jaw on the floor. I’m just gonna get right into the tea I guess.
Natalie caught her first husband, Robert Wagner, having sex with a man (Robert’s “butler” who he’d been living with for years) and it psychologically crippled her to an extent I don’t believe she ever recovered from, having married Wagner at the tender age of nineteen. Natalie divorced him, kept his secret and took the fall for the end of the marriage, not wanting to ruin his career by outing him. Wagner was a closeted, social climbing sociopath who believed he could use Natalie in all her adoration of him (she had fantasized about marrying him since she was a little girl) as a way to cement his own fame and hide his sexual orientation. Not a particularly talented actor, who was never able to climb the heights of acclaim he hoped to, he ingratiated himself with powerful men in Hollywood and very young women who were well connected and who he could manipulate (he almost married Tina Sinatra, 18 years his junior).
Swooping in after Natalie’s divorce from her second husband, when she was very vulnerable, Wagner and Natalie married again. During their years apart when Natalie had been dating Warren Betty, Wagner, insanely, in his own memoir wrote about how he used to hang around outside Warren’s house with a gun, hoping to kill him. He spoke about his jealousy over Natalie dating someone much more respected as an actor than he was. I have spent a lot of time wondering why Natalie remarried him, someone who had betrayed her so deeply, why someone who was phobic of water and could barely swim would spend so much time on Wagner’s boat, why a loving husband would put his wife in that situation over and over again. And all I can think is that Natalie wanted to make everyone happy, and had been trained since childhood to do whatever men wanted, that it was her only path to success and safety and happiness. And that she wanted so much to have the fairy tale marriage that everyone thought she had with Wagner the first time around, that she probably thought she could “fix it” this time, having grown up in a household with no concept of what real love or safety felt like. I guess in that way, she’s like many women.
Anyway, she was quietly unhappy toward the end of her second marriage to Wagner and though there is some debate about it, she was probably having an affair with Christopher Walken (a recent Oscar winner) who was on the boat with her and Robert Wagner the night she died. I won’t get into all the details about how she died and Wagner’s nonsensical account of what happened and all the horrible things he did to ensure Natalie would drown and hopefully never be found, or the fact that Walken won’t say anything about it, or the recent reopening of the case. But basically—Natalie and Wagner had a blow out fight in the middle of the night that could be heard from other boats and they chased each other up on deck and he pushed her off the deck. She cried for help for a long time in the water and people on other boats heard a man mocking her cries and eventually the crying stopped. And then Wagner, and his connections, covered it up and paid people off.
Idk, I’m not writing well about it, I’m just angry. I’d also like to add something here about that fucker, Frank Sinatra. Outside of the late 90s when I thought Swingers was the coolest movie ever, I’ve never particularly given a shit about Frank Sinatra but JFC this book cast him in a light I’ll never be able to unsee. The author of Natalie’s biography, Suzanne Finstad, shares this about him in the afterward:
Finstad goes on to point out that today: “the 38-year-old Sinatra’s ‘seduction’ of 15-year-old Natalie…would have been both child molestation and statutory rape.” Additionally, Sinatra extensively helped Robert Wagner cover up Natalie’s murder. Everyone who supposedly cared about Natalie stood by Wagner in the end. Sinatra was one of her pallbearers. Finstad says several times that Natalie, a victim of abuse and exploitation, went out of her way throughout her life to protect everyone she loved, often at her own expense, but that no one ever protected Natalie, and that she was betrayed and abandoned even in death.
Finstad’s book is meticulously researched, and though she went into writing her biography of Natalie with no particular opinion about her death or desire to explore it in depth (ruled an “accidental drowning” in 1980), she uncovered so much fucked up shit about it that she ended up making a timeline of events the night of Natalie’s murder. The timeline was so shocking, it caused Natalie’s murder investigation to be reopened, though for Wagner to be convicted there would have to be proof of first degree murder which, forty years on, is unlikely to ever happen. Interestingly, Natalie’s oldest daughter, Natasha, Robert Wagner’s step daughter, has been on a recent campaign to protect Robert Wagner from further accusation, publishing a book and making an HBO documentary about his innocence, clearly motivated by the damning evidence Finstad’s biography uncovered. It’s really depressing and gets into weird accusatory interfamilial drama that maybe it has become important for Natasha to cling to. I can’t imagine how psychologically damaging it would be to wrap your mind around the fact that one of your parents killed the other. Perhaps it is impossible for her to do. Here is a critical look at Natasha’s documentary which states that Natasha’s desire to push away attention from Wagner’s possible involvement, only intensifies speculation.
And here’s a tl;dr from Finstad, writing for Los Angeles Magazine, which is where I pulled the above quotes from, if you can’t be arsed to read the whole biography—Natalie Wood biography excerpt. I will say that though Finstad’s research is impressive and engrossing, it’s not a beautifully written book. I struggled at times with the endless “dark Russian eyes,” “intense Russian drama,” “her fierce Russian temper,” “mystical Russian prophecies,” etc. Everyone was bursting with supposedly Russian traits that ended up making Russia sound like a fairy world and Russian people some kind of weird other from a fantasy realm.
This is Sad & Famous an occasional newsletter where I talk about celeb memoirs and biographies I read and as well as various sad media I consume.