About four years ago I requested an interview with legendary actor, Robert Wagner. The idea came to mind as I was writing my “Starmaker” piece on Hollywood agent Budd Burton Moss for the September 2014 issue of ALIVE Magazine. When I finally got the call from Budd Moss recently that the long-awaited interview was granted, I knew my quest to learn things about the superstar that were heretofore unknown, was about to be realized.
Robert Wagner was very generous with his time as we spoke on the phone for nearly half an hour. “Did you know that Budd Moss and I were grammar school students together?” he asked. While I had composed my questions carefully, the conversation took on a more friendly tone. “Budd told me about you. I’m looking forward to meeting you someday,” he continued, “Do you ever get down to LA?” My heart missed a beat or two.
I was curious about Robert Wagner’s early years in Hollywood; the movies, the many television series, and his producing experiences that may make for an interesting Talese-style piece. “Could you tell me about your early successes in the industry?”
“The 50s, 60s and 70s were a different era. We’d pitch an idea and put it together. Today decisions are made by committee and large corporations,” he explained. I was in my element as being a movie aficionado most of my life I never missed a movie and I must confess I had carried a torch for the excruciatingly handsome Robert Wagner since seeing him on the big screen decades ago on the other side of the world. I asked about A Kiss Before Dying, one of his early movies in 1956.
“I enjoyed working with Joanne Woodward in her first film, A Kiss Before Dying, she was terrific. I stop and see her when I visit the East Coast,” he added.
“May I call you RJ?” I asked and explained that I had read his memoir.
Makings of A Star
Robert Wagner, known as RJ to family and friends, recently turned eighty-eight, but has not slowed down one bit. My problem was where to start to write a piece on such a giant in the world of film and television, so I read his poignant memoir, Pieces of My Heart.
I learned about his childhood, dreams, career, loves, and losses that make up the man who has been an iconic movie star and producer for nearly seven decades. In his memoir, Wagner admits to a difficult childhood; raised by a strict German-American father who moved the family from Michigan to Bel Air, California, to ease his wife’s asthma. The disciplinarian father sent young RJ to several boarding schools, including the Hollywood Military Academy, where he met many sons of the Hollywood elite.
As a teenager, Wagner decided to be an actor, and being a rebel with a cause, tenaciously pursued his dream. To earn money, he caddied at the Bel Air Country Club for the likes of Fred Astaire and Clark Gable, and the golfing friendships gave him entree to premier movie moguls. The handsome young man easily moved in the right circles which served as stepping stones towards the fulfilment of his filmdom dream. He attended school with the son of Norma Shearer and Irving Thalberg, dated daughters of Alan Ladd and Gloria Swanson, and hitched rides with the likes of Errol Flynn.
Being a natural athlete, Wagner excelled as a diver, swimmer, tennis player, and horseback rider, and he was precisely situated in the perfect place to break into the business where dreams of the big screen came true.
RJ put himself front and center of the action as he hung around Catalina Island hotspots where movie stars moored their boats. He played baseball with John Ford, John Wayne, and Ward Bond. Clark Gable took him to MGM to meet producers, and he attended parties at the home of Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs, called Tarzana. And yes, they even named the town “Tarzana,” for the jungle tree swinger.
Wagner tells of the time he worked on the John Ford project, What Price Glory. Director Ford’s nickname for Wagner was “Boob” which he’d shout across the set. “Yes sir Mr. Ford,” he’d answer, and then listened intently for direction.
Wagner said he enjoyed working on the film with Corinne Calvert and James Cagney. “I used to jog Jimmy’s horses for him… he had Morgan’s and trotters.” In What Price Glory, as the character Private Lewisohn, Wagner had to die in Cagney’s arms.
By the time RJ was 18 he had signed with 20th Century Fox as a contract player for six months in 1948, at the behest of Darryl F. Zanuck, for $75 a week. Twelve years later, and groomed to perfection by the studio system, he was making five thousand dollars a week.
Robert Wagner soon took ownership of the word “debonair,” as the very elegant man-about-town segued to unbridled stardom.
From Films to Television
I asked Robert Wagner which picture was the most influential to his career. “In 1951 I got my first billing in Halls of Montezuma with Richard Widmark, but my first big break was With A Song in My Heart in 1952 with Susan Hayward. After that film I got 5,000 fan letters.”
With a Song in My Heart, a post-war patriotic film, was a box office hit directed by Walter Lang and produced by Darryl F. Zanuck. Robert Wagner’s epic two-line cameo as a young, war-wounded soldier, with Susan Hayward portraying the life-story of singer Jane Froman, brought audiences to tears.
By 1956 Wagner was highly sought after and starred as a conniving villain in the film noir thriller, A Kiss Before Dying, where he met his demise. Spencer Tracy, having worked with Wagner in Broken Lance in 1954, requested that RJ get star billing and his name above the title, and then suggested him to play his young brother in The Mountain in 1956. The action-packed film about a perilous climb to reach a crashed plane was made on location in the French Alps, thus bonding their friendship.
With his career at full throttle, he quickly became a hot property. Life was good. When Robert Wagner met the beautiful actress, Natalie Wood, he knew he had found the right person. They fell head-over-heels in love and were married in 1957. Considered to be Hollywood’s premier star couple, they were living the perfect life with perfect friends in a perfect house.
Hectic schedules, studio commitments, and factors that besiege many Hollywood people all culminated into a perfect storm of marital turmoil. By 1961 the once-perfect couple had separated and RJ moved to Europe. While living in Italy, Wagner met up with his longtime producer friend Darryl Zanuck who cast him as an Army Ranger in the cameo-studded, The Longest Day, with Richard Burton, John Wayne, and Sean Connery, which brilliantly portrayed the 1944 D-Day invasion of Normandy.
By the mid-1960s, Wagner had honed his comic sense of timing in the blockbuster Pink Panther series, and later as the sinister, eye-patched
“Number 2” in the 1990s Austin Powers franchise. On the “Panther” set he became good friends with David Niven and Peter Sellers, and in his memoir, he writes of their escapades at the Cortina D’Ampezzo ski resort in the Italian Dolomites.
I asked RJ about his best film work and most difficult project. “I loved making the Pink Panther and working with David Niven,” he said. “The most difficult projects are the television series because you have to keep pounding them out.” He says in his book that the cost to produce a television series runs about $2 million per hour.
Wagner had seamlessly segued from block buster films into the small screen niche in the late 1960s with the It Takes a Thief series which garnered him an Emmy nomination. Later he starred with Stephanie Powers in the enormously successful, Hart to Hart series, and then he had a recurring role in the NCIS franchise.
Wagner shared the screen with his longtime buddies, Fred Astaire and William Holden, in the blockbuster hit disaster drama Towering Inferno in 1974. Over seven decades, Robert Wagner has starred in over 80 films, several stage plays, and has produced and starred in umpteen television series and movies.
I couldn’t resist asking him his favorite actor and actress. “There were many. That’s a tough question,” he answered. “I know, that’s why I asked you,” I chuckled. “I would say Fred Astaire and Spencer Tracy, but later I loved working with David Niven. My favorite actress… I worked with the best; Sophia Loren, Audrey Hepburn, and of course, my very close friend, Liz Taylor. She was one of the finest actresses and we worked together in There Must Be A Pony, a film I produced that was beautifully written for Elizabeth. Stephanie Powers was also great to work with on Hart to Hart. She brought a lot to the project.”
I asked about the most challenging film he worked on and got the impression there were none except for The Mountain with Spencer Tracy, only in that there was a heart stopping case of vertigo during a cable car malfunction when the cable detached in the Chamonix Mountains near Mont Blanc. In his memoir, Wagner writes an interesting account about the terrifying incident involving Spencer Tracy.
Life, Loves & Losses
In Wagner’s memoir, Pieces of My Heart, he writes fondly about his four-year love affair with Barbara Stanwyck, who was 24 years his senior when he was only 22. They had worked together on Titanic in 1953. Stanwyk and Wagner remained very close friends until she passed in 1990.
In his poignant memoir, he reminisces about some of the world’s most beautiful women that he dated, including Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe and Joan Collins. While he was smarting from the breakup with Natalie Wood, he found solace in making films in Italy. Director Vittorio De Sica cast him in The Condemned of Altona, where he worked with the divine, Sophia Loren.
After working in Italy, he married Marion Marshall in 1963 in New York. They returned to California and bought a ranch in Tarzana near the old Rice Burroughs place. Their daughter was born in 1964 named Kate, “for Hepburn,” he said.
But through all his ups and downs and loves and losses, there was only one woman who still owned his heart. Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood found themselves often in the same place at the same time. They were remarried in 1972 and the following year their baby daughter, Courtney, was born. Their lives again had become blissfully perfect until fate intervened.
One rainy November night in 1981, they were on their yacht, “Splendour,” off Catalina Island, when Natalie tragically drowned. President Ronald Reagan and Queen Elizabeth sent their condolences and the world mourned.
You Must Remember This
Robert Wagner married Jill St. John in 1990. They had been longtime friends as Jill, Natalie, and Stephanie Powers were in ballet school together as young girls. Jill St. John starred in the television series, Banning, and Tony Rome, with Frank Sinatra, as well as scores of films. She is well known as one of the fabled “Bond Girls,” having starred in Diamonds Are Forever with Sean Connery. Jill, being a Cordon Bleu-trained chef, penned a popular gourmet cook book and has been a regular guest on television cooking shows.
Today the Wagners are very involved in charity work, and RJ is on the board of the Tracy Clinic of Hollywood that supports hearing-impaired children. He has penned three books including, You Must Remember This, I Loved Her in The Movies, and his most recent New York Times best seller memoir, Pieces of My Heart.
He told me he had another book in the works with the working title, Heroes, about the 1950s Hollywood blacklist period. “I knew a lot of people who were affected. It was a difficult time in America,” he said.
The Wagners live in Aspen and are busy with book signing events and personal appearances. I asked about the upcoming Burton Moss Hollywood Golden Era Award, designed by Edwina Sandys, he will be receiving in October. “I spoke to her you know. I’ll show the sculpture to my grandchildren and say, ‘see your grandfather was highly respected’,” he laughed.
RJ to Receive the Burton Moss Hollywood Golden Era Award
This year, the second annual Burton Moss Hollywood Golden Era Award sculpture will be presented to Robert Wagner, at the Gold Coast International Film Festival, in New York. Last year was the first annual Burton Moss Hollywood Golden Era Award presentation named after the man who represented some of Hollywood’s greatest stars: Bette Davis, Robert Vaughn, Tom Cruise, Cliff Robertson, Sidney Poitier, Ruth Roman, Cyd Charisse, Mia Farrow, Larry King, Constance Towers, Tippi Hendren and Rita Hayworth.
The first award, in 2017, was presented posthumously to Rita Hayworth and accepted by her daughter, Princess Yasmin Aga Khan, at the New York City home of sculptor Edwina Sandys, who is Sir Winston Churchill’s granddaughter.
The award was created to preserve the legacy of the golden age of Hollywood and shine a spotlight on those who made it great but who may not have been sufficiently honored for their lifetime bodies of work.
The award presentation coincides with the Annual Gold Coast International Film Festival, founded by its executive director, Regina Geller Gil. Among the advisory board members to nominate the recipient of the Burton Moss Golden Era Award are Larry King, Joel Grey, Richard Thomas, Tippi Hendren, Carole Shelley, Katherine Quinn, Greg Mullavey, and Edwina Sandys.
The Burton Moss Award sculpture is an original work of art created by sculptor Edwina Sandys to be presented in October at the Gold Coast International Film Festival in New York. Sandys has exhibited in London, Dublin, New York, Toronto, Washington D.C., and Rome. The United Nations has installed five of her monumental sculptures at U.N. centers around the world.
So, after my four year wait to interview the most auspicious and enduring actor, Robert Wagner himself, here is my story on one of Hollywood’s most accomplished performers who not only brought elegance and savior faire to the Big Screen, but also represented the Golden Age of Movies that not only made people cry and laugh, but fall in love.
Leave a Reply