Robert Wagner - Personal Life

Personal Life

In his memoirs, Wagner claims to have had affairs with Yvonne De Carlo, Joan Crawford, Elizabeth Taylor, Anita Ekberg, Shirley Anne Field and Joan Collins. He had a four-year romantic relationship with Barbara Stanwyck after they acted together in the movie Titanic (1953). Because of the age difference – he was 22, she was 45 – they kept the affair secret to avoid damage to their careers.

On December 28, 1957, Wagner married Natalie Wood when he was 27 and she was 18. They separated in June 1961 and divorced on April 27, 1962.

While working on location in Europe, Wagner reconnected with an old acquaintance, actress Marion Marshall. In the spring of 1963, after a brief courtship, Wagner, Marshall, and her two children from her marriage to Stanley Donen moved back to America. Wagner and Marshall married on July 22, 1963, in the Bronx Courthouse. Soon after, they had a daughter, Katie Wagner (born May 11, 1964). The two were together for nearly eight years before they separated in late 1970. They were divorced on April 26, 1971. Wagner's only grandchild is Katie's son, Riley John Wagner-Lewis (born 21 September 2006).

In 1971, Wagner was briefly engaged to Tina Sinatra.

Wagner kept in contact with Natalie Wood, whose short-lived marriage to Richard Gregson ended in early 1972. Wagner remarried her on July 16, 1972. Their only child, Courtney Wagner, was born on March 9, 1974. On November 29, 1981, Natalie Wood drowned near their yacht Splendour while it was moored near Catalina Island; also on board were Wagner, Christopher Walken, who was co-starring with her in the motion picture Brainstorm, and Dennis Davern, a captain. Wagner subsequently became the legal guardian of Wood's daughter Natasha Gregson. He is estranged from Natalie Wood's sister Lana Wood, who claims Wagner refused to let her see her nieces after Natalie Wood's death.

In November 2011, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department reopened its investigation into Natalie Wood's death after the captain of the boat, Dennis Davern, told NBC News that he lied to police during the initial investigation and that a fight between Wood and Wagner had led to her drowning. After nine months of further investigation, Los Angeles County Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran amended Wood's death certificate and changed the reason of her death from accidental drowning to "drowning and other undetermined factors". The amended document also now states that the circumstances of how Wood ended up in water are "not clearly established."

In early 1982, Wagner began a relationship with actress Jill St. John, who coincidentally was a childhood acquaintance of Natalie Wood and Wagner's Hart to Hart co-star Stefanie Powers, as well as starring alongside Natalie's sister Lana Wood in Diamonds Are Forever. The couple had first met in the late 1950s when Wagner was an up-and-coming actor and St. John was a teenage starlet. After an eight-year courtship, they were married on May 26, 1990.