...

...drowned after falling off the yacht that you, she and
Robert Wagner were staying on. You have maintained a strict silence about the
incidence------
Walken: Out of respect for the family. It's not my place to talk about that.
The other thing is, there really is nothing to talk about. Anybody there saw
the logistics---of the boat, the night, where we were, that it is was
raining---and would know exactly what happened. You hear about things
happening to people--- they slip in the bathtub, fall down the stairs, step
off the curb in London because they think that the cars come the other
way----and they die. You feel you want to die making an effort at something,
you don't want to die in some unnecessary way. What happened that night only
she knows, because she was alone. There were four of us on that boat, not
three of us. There was a captain too. She had gone to bed before us, and her
room was at the back. A dinghy was bouncing against the side of the boat, and
I think she went out to move it. There was a ski ramp that was partially in
the water. It was slippery---I had walked on it myself. She had told me she
couldn't swim; in fact, they had to cut a swimming scene from the movie. She
was probably half asleep, and she was wearing a coat. She apparently moved
the boat around, slipped, hit her head, fell into the water. She was
discovered separate from the boat: Why would she get into the boat, then get
out of it and into the water? She couldn't swim. She hit her head, went into
the water, the boat floated away, she floated away. In the meantime, we were
sitting in the living room, the three of us, talking. And I remember
distinctly that about 45 minutes after she had gone to bed, RJ went down to
her room, came back and said "Natalie's not there" And then the Coast Guard
was called.
I feel funny talking about it in such detail, but the fact that she had gone
in the dinghy the night before made it sound like we were on the high seas.
We were 50 feet off the beach, moored to one of those balls, and there were
boats all around. It was a drizzly night, so it wasn't like people were
siting out on their decks. But there was a hotel with a restaurant on the
shore. She had gone there the night before to call her kids because the phone
on the boat wasn't working. The first assumption was that that's was she had
done. She was very spontaneous. The idea that she had gotten into the boat to
go call her kids was not far-fetched. The first reaction was: I hope
everything's OK. But then time passed.