Excerpted from MORE THAN LOVE: An Intimate Portrait of My Mother, Natalie Wood, by Natasha Gregson Wagner. Copyright © 2020 by Natasha Gregson Wagner. Excerpted with permission by Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Natasha, Natalie, and Courtney at the house on North Canon Drive, 1977 | Credit: Wood-Wagner Private Collection.

In the early spring of 1974, life was blooming anew. Roses and gardenias were budding in our Palm Springs backyard, our dog Penny gave birth to a litter of puppies, and my mom went away to the hospital and emerged with a baby.

There’s a home movie of me kissing her pregnant belly, so I’m sure my mom must have explained her pregnancy to me, but I was too young to understand and I don’t have any memories of that time. What I do vividly recall is the shock of suddenly seeing my mom arrive at our house in Palm Springs in an ambulance.

I was allowed to climb up into the ambulance to see her. She was resting on a stretcher and clutching a tiny swaddled bundle close to her chest.

“Natooshie, this is your new sister, Courtney, and she’s brought you a present,” my mother announced. I liked presents, but I was suspicious. What was the catch? I unwrapped the package tied up with a ribbon. Inside was a pretty new doll.

“Would you like to hold Courtney?” Mommie asked in a lullaby voice. “She looks so much like you!”

I peeked into the fuzzy blanketed bundle and saw a little sleeping face that looked more like Daddy Wagner to me. Who is this person in my mother’s arms? I’m supposed to be the only one in my mother’s arms!

I hoped we could work out a bargain. Could I keep my doll but send the baby back?

It soon dawned on me that, unlike Penny’s puppies—which we gave away to good homes—Courtney was here to stay.

Now that my parents had two children, they decided to move back to town and settle down in Beverly Hills. We rented a house there while my mom shot the comedy Peeper with Michael Caine, and then a place in Malibu, before moving into a house on North Canon Drive. My stepsister Katie—Daddy Wagner’s daughter from his prior marriage who was six years older than me—lived nearby with her mother and so could easily come to visit us.

Our new white Cape Cod–style two-story house was in the heart of Beverly Hills. Designed by the architect Gerard Colcord, it had dark blue shutters framing the windows and a tall sycamore tree shading the wide, flat front yard with its low picket fence. In the back was an oval pool with turquoise tile. Boughs of bright pink bougainvillea dangled over potted pansies, geraniums, and hibiscus flowers. In the fall, the lemons would ripen from green to yellow on our lemon tree. Bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds hovered year-round.

Natalie and Natasha at home on North Bentley Avenue, 1971 | Credit: Wood-Wagner Private Collection.

The house itself was large but not showy. My mom was very involved in the decor. Decorating was not just her favorite hobby; she even ran her own freelance interior design business for a few years— Natalie Wood Interiors—decorating houses for her clients, who were mainly her friends. My mother loved to make statements with bold patterns and colors, particularly her favorite, blue. There was floral-patterned wallpaper covering nearly every wall: blue laurel wallpaper in my parents’ bedroom, a pink-and-green rose pattern in my bedroom, and a motif of red, green, orange, and purple lilies in the hallway. It was as if she wanted to bring her favorite season, spring, inside. She loved when everything was blooming in the garden, and would often be outside, cutting roses and her favorite fragrant white gardenias to arrange in silver vases around the house.

I remember fireplaces in almost every room, with a picturesque, hand-carved marble fireplace in my parents’ bedroom. Heavy dark wood pieces sat alongside wicker furniture and big, upholstered chairs and sofas. Photos of family and friends in silver frames dotted shelves and long tables; on the walls hung framed Chinese needlepoint and works of art. Everything had a connection to someone famous or admired, or to a relative or friend. A Marcel Vertès painting of a ballerina hung in the living room, given to my parents by Jack Warner, my mom’s boss back in her Warner Bros. contract days. Our long travertine coffee table had once been owned by Marion Davies. She had been a famous movie star my dad remembered fondly from his childhood. The word that comes to mind when I think of this time is “bountiful.”

For my mother, having children was a do-over, a chance to raise us in a way she wished she had been raised, to give her daughters the childhood that she had missed. My mother had been working as a professional actress since she was six. She was a wunderkind, balancing her acting work with public appearances, school, ballet, piano lessons, Girl Scouts, and horseback riding. She was also the breadwinner for her family, supporting her parents and her sisters from a very young age. She didn’t stop working her entire childhood. She couldn’t. The prosperity of her family depended on it.

“I never got to have a real childhood,” she used to say, her voice sounding a little sad. “I grew up on studio soundstages.” Or, “I learned how to decorate my home from the sets on my movies.” She used to say she could concentrate on schoolwork only when someone was banging a hammer because she was so accustomed to studying on noisy, bustling movie sets.

The childhood she created for us at the house on Canon Drive was very different. Our home was alive with animals and close friends and family, yet our bedtimes were enforced, we went to regular school, and we kept regular hours. Dinner was on the table at six, and no ifs, ands, or buts, we took showers every night. Above all, we were given time to play and to simply be young, roaming the gardens, lost in our games.

As well as dogs, we had cats, guinea pigs, mice, and birds we kept in shiny cages in the small kitchen adjacent to our playroom. The animals were always having babies, and so then there would be puppies, kittens, and baby guinea pigs as well as tiny mice that appeared one morning in the mouse cage after the mommy mouse escaped and somehow located a daddy mouse. My mother was a true animal lover. She often favored the ugly ones, like the small black Labrador– Jack Russell mix with rotten teeth and bad breath that she adopted from Dr. Shipp’s Animal Hospital. We called him “Siggy,” but his full name was Sigmund, after Freud himself. “I’m naming him Sigmund Freud,” my mom joked, “because everybody needs a good shrink in the house.”

She had a special way of communing with animals. When one of our cats, Maggie or Louise, would saunter by, I would grab at them, holding them awkwardly. They would inevitably wriggle out of my arms, leaving a small scratch or two as they pulled away from my grasp. My mother seemed to know how to pick them up so they were soothed and still, rocking them like babies and talking to them in her most delicate voice. The cats would relax immediately, folding themselves into her embrace, purring contentedly. “How does she do that?” I asked myself.

One day she was in the playroom holding Courtney’s white cockatiel on her finger. I had friends over and we were sitting quietly on the floor, marveling at how the bird stayed there, perched on her extended finger as if drawn to her magnetically. “Hello, beautiful bird,” she cooed in a voice as light as air, stroking the bird gently as we all watched, enraptured. Out of nowhere, our black-and-white cat, Maggie, swooped into the room, leaped toward my mom’s hand, and ate the cockatiel in one swallow! A few white feathers in the air were all that remained. We were completely stunned. My mom’s expression was a cross between wonder, shock, and respect for Maggie’s feline abilities. “R.J.!” she called. “Maggie the cat just ate Courtney’s bird!” My friends and I sat openmouthed, not knowing whether to cry or laugh.

More Than Love: An Intimate Portrait of My Mother, Natalie Wood is the heartbreaking, never-before-told story of Hollywood icon Natalie Wood's glamorous life, sudden death, and lasting legacy — is a memoir of loss, grief, and coming-of-age by Natasha Gregson Wagner, a daughter of Hollywood royalty. Scribner is proud to publish it on May 5, 2020.

The HBO Documentary film, “Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind,” for which Gregson Wagner serves as a producer, had its world premiere at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and will debut on HBO on May 5.

Natasha Gregson Wagner has acted in such films as Another Day in Paradise, High Fidelity, Two Girls and a Guy, and David Lynch’s Lost Highway, and she has received acclaim for her stage work and television appearances in Ally McBeal, House MD, and Chicago Hope. In 2016, she coauthored a coffee table book titled Natalie Wood: Reflections of a Legendary Life. She is one of the producers of the upcoming HBO documentary of her mother’s life: Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind. Wagner lives in Los Angeles with her family.