Natalie Wood's Daughter Opens Up About Her Untimely Death: 'I Have Spent a Lot of Time Trying to Figure Out How I Am Different from Her and How I Am Similar'

One of the things Natasha Gregson Wagner remembers most about her mother, actress Natalie Wood, is her smell.

"I knew when she was home because I would smell her perfume," Gregson Wagner told the New York Times in a Saturday story. "She would waft through the house."

Woods' favorite was a gardenia perfume, Jungle Gardenia, which she wore "all her life."

Though she has rarely spoken of her mother's death at 43, Gregson Wagner, now 45, opened up to the Times – not just about Wood's absence, but her essence, the spirit of her life before it ended far too soon.



"She was hilarious," Gregson Wagner told the paper. "She was always so funny. She would walk into our house and everything would be better. If she walked into a room and it was sepia, it suddenly became bright colors.

"My mom and my dad were always laughing at each other's jokes. Her laugh was this deep 'HAHAHA!' She would always say to my dad [Wood's husband, Robert J. Wagner]: 'Oh R J, just stop it! I can't! Just stop it!' "

Wood, known for her roles in Miracle on 34th Street, Rebel Without a Cause and West Side Story, was a woman who wrote "love letters in loopy script to her daughters that quoted from The Little Prince, knew how to burn the end of a wine-bottle cork to create makeshift eye shadow, sometimes yelled, was always bossy [and] never cooked (or at least not well)," according to Times.

While Gregson Wagner told the paper she was "in therapy from, like, the minute [Wood] died until I was 30," she said she is in "a healthier place" now.

She is raising a young daughter, 3-year-old Clover, with husband Barry Watson, with whom she has been together for nearly six years, according to the Times.

"When you grow up with a mom who is so enigmatic and gorgeous and full of charisma and power," Gregson Wagner told the paper, before shifting her thought. "Well, because I was 11 when she died, I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out how I am different from her and how I am similar, to help me have my own individuality."

She continued, "In the past, other boyfriends or husbands have been sort of exhausted by it or annoyed by it or thought it was a pall cast over the relationship.

"But maybe because I'm in a healthier place with it, Barry seems really excited to hear the stories about my mom, and I hear him say to Clover, 'Oh yeah, there is a picture of Grandma Natalie!' "

Gregson Wagner's new comments come as she launches a gardenia-scented perfume of her own, in honor of and named for her mom.

It's called "Natalie."