Natalie Wood’s Daughter Says Robert Wagner ‘Didn’t Think I’d Make It’ (Exclusive)

After the death of her mom, Natalie Wood, Natasha Gregson Wagner, then just 11 years old, remembers thinking, “If I don’t deal with this, it will kill me, so I’m going to deal with it.”

And so the day after her mother died by drowning on Nov. 29, 1981, she told her biological father, Richard Gregson, whom she calls “Daddy Gregson,” and her stepfather, Robert Wagner, whom she calls “Daddy Wagner,” that she wanted to put a note in her mom’s casket. 

“I thought, ‘The first thing I need to do is I need to go see her,'” Natasha, 54, tells PEOPLE. “And that’s what I told my dads. ‘I need to go see my mom.’ And they called in a psychiatrist.”

“Then my Daddy Gregson took me, and I wrote her a letter and I put it under her hand,” she continues. “That was the first step I took on my walk of acceptance. And from there, I’ve just gone into the heart of it.”

The steps to acceptance were many for Natasha, mom to 13-year-old daughter Clover, whom she shares with husband Barry Watson.

Her first, most public step came in 2016 with the launch of her fragrance line, Natalie, inspired by her mother. She recently relaunched the line as L’Amour Mere, with three new scents: the original Gardenia-inspired scent, Natalie; the rose-based fragrance, C-Love (“That is Clover’s name, if you add the ‘R,'” she notes); and Lyublyu, which translates to “love” in Russian, a nod to her maternal grandmother. 

“It was hard for me to find my strength for a long time, but now I do feel it,” says Natasha, who wrote a memoir, More Than Love, in 2020, along with the accompanying HBO documentary, Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind.

“Because everything that happened was so public, but grief is so private,” she says. “The truth is I do feel better when I talk about my grief.”

Natasha remained extremely close to her stepfather, Robert, who remarried her mother in 1972 when she was a toddler. The Towering Inferno actor had first married Wood in 1957. The couple divorced in 1962.

Robert Wagner, now 95, raised Natasha, along with sisters Katie Wagner and Courtney Wagner, and is “proud” of her, she says. “He always told me that. He told me this once when we were having some therapy together. He said, ‘I never thought you would make it when your mom died,’ because I was so close to her. And so he’s always blown away that I am totally okay.”

“I have had a great life, but I was so broken at that moment,” she admits, “so I think he feels like if he dies tomorrow, he knows I’m going to be okay, but I’ll miss him a lot.”

“I think that grief is a lifetime of work, but the fragrance is just one little beautiful area of my life that is about beauty and something positive,” she reflects. “Like alchemy, turning metal into gold. I turned my sadness and pain into beauty.”

Today, she credits her mom with teaching her resilience. “She was a good teacher, even though I don’t think she knew she was teaching me anything,” Natasha notes. “She didn’t think, ‘I’m going to teach her how to survive my loss.’ But just those 11 years with her definitely taught me how to survive her loss. Because that strength and vulnerability that she had, she gave that to me.”