‍Natalie Wood with her sister Lana who saw her crying
after the alleged hotel attack

‍ONE of Hollywood’s darkest Press rumours was that Hollywood actress Natalie Wood was raped by a top movie star more than twice her age at a hotel in Los Angeles as a teenager.

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‍And the newspaper rumours circulated for decades that Spartacus star Kirk Douglas was her attacker, a claim he denied.

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‍But in a book covered by the Associated Press after he died, Natalie’s younger sister claimed she remembers that fateful night.

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‍Lana Wood wrote: “I remember that Natalie looked especially beautiful when Mom and I dropped her off at the Chateau Marmont entrance in the summer of 1955, around the time Sis was filming The Searchers.”

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‍A meeting with Douglas had been arranged by their mother, Maria Zakharenko, who thought that “many doors might be thrown open for her, with just a nod of his famous, handsome head on her behalf.”

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‍Lana, who was eight at the time, added: “It seemed like a long time passed before Natalie got back into the car and woke me up when she slammed the door shut.

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‍“She looked awful. She was very dishevelled and upset, and she and Mom started urgently whispering to each other. I couldn’t really hear them or make out what they were saying properly. But they were agreeing it would ruin Natalie’s career to publicly accuse him.

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‍According to Lana her mother told Natalie to “Just suck it up!”

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‍Natalie, 16 at the time, did not discuss with her what happened until both were adults when Natalie, after describing being taken to Douglas’s suite, told her sister, “And, uh … he hurt me, Lana.

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‍“It was like an out-of-body experience. I was terrified, I was confused.” She went on to reveal more details of the assault.

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‍In 1981, Natalie drowned in mysterious circumstances after falling off the yacht she owned with actor husband Robert Wagner.

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‍The child star was pushed into acting by her domineering mother who forced her to cry for one role by watching her tear a butterfly apart to stop it fluttering.

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‍Douglas always acknowledged that he was a womaniser and an unfaithful husband.

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‍Speaking to the Associated Press about the actor in December 2016, his friend, dancer Neile Adams said: “You could not sit beside him without his hand crawling up your leg.”

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‍In his memoir The Ragman’s Son, published in 1988, Douglas writes briefly about Natalie. He remembers driving home one night and stopping at a red light.

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‍“The door of the car in front of me opened and a pretty little girl wearing a suede jacket hopped out and ran up to me.

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‍“She said: ‘Oh, Mr Douglas, would you please sign my jacket?’ As I obliged, the woman who was driving got out and introduced her. ‘This is my daughter. She’s in movies, too. Her name is Natalie Wood.’”

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‍That was the first time I met Natalie. I saw her many times afterwards, before she died in that cruel accident.”

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‍Kirk Douglas died in February 2020, aged 103.

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‍LAST HAUNTED DAYS OF SEAMAN IN CROW’S NEST OF DOOMED TITANIC

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‍WHEN Merchant Seaman Fred Fleet retired, he sold copies of the Southampton Echo on the street near his home to make an extra few bob for his pension … but most people didn’t know he kept a secret that haunted him to his grave.

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‍He was the sailor on watch who first saw the giant iceberg the Titanic was steaming towards. On April 14, 1912, Fred, pictured, climbed halfway up the 50ft mast to the crow’s nest to start his watch.

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‍It was, he said, “the most beautiful night I had ever seen. The stars were like lamps.”

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‍The liner was 400 miles off the Newfoundland coastline, and it was bitterly cold. He had been instructed by the officer of the watch to keep a careful lookout for ice.

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‍At some point in the following two hours, he saw ‘a black object, high above the water, right ahead.’

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‍Fearing it was an iceberg he rang the crow’s nest bell and telephoned the bridge but to his amazement, no-one answered. The iceberg was about 10 miles away with Titanic steaming directly towards it at a speed of 22 knots – less than 25 minutes before collision.

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‍Fleet, who was not given any binoculars, repeatedly telephoned the bridge before his calls were answered and when he finally managed to pass his message, it was too late.

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‍Within a minute of Fleet’s message finally being received, the Titanic struck the iceberg and within three hours it had sunk. Almost 1,500 people died but over 700 survived.

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‍Fred helped women and children into one of the lifeboats and rowed them to safety. But he always feared he would be prosecuted for the tragedy  and at an inquiry his timings of the sighting were disputed. He went on to suffer nightmares.

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‍Fifty-three years after that fateful night in the Atlantic, Fred, still haunted by the tragedy, started to appear depressed as his wife’s health deteriorated and he said to his daughter, ‘When your mother goes, I will not be far behind’.

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‍His wife Eva died on December 28, 1964, and on January 10, 1965, Fred was found hanging by a length of string from a clothes line post in the back garden of his home in Norman Road, Southampton. He left a suicide note.

‍His family arranged his funeral at Southampton’s Hollybrook cemetery, and although they could not afford a headstone, they regularly tended his grave.

‍For more than 30 years Frederick’s grave was unmarked until the British Titanic Society, and the American Titanic Historical Society, erected a headstone that featured an engraving of the stricken liner.

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‍Hetty Green, one of the world’s richest women,
the Press called her the Witch of Wall Street

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‍WHY BILLIONAIRE HETTY WAS

‍THE WORLD’S BIGGEST MISER

‍WHILE surfing through the newspaper archives on the Wall Street crash, one name kept popping up that I had never heard of — a lady named Hetty Green.

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‍All my notes were on people like J.P. Morgan, the financier who dominated Wall Street in around 1907; steel magnate Andrew Carnegie and of course business tycoon John D Rockefeller.

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‍So, I was surprised to learn that Hetty was America’s first female tycoon and not only that, was in the Guinness Book of Records as the World’s Greatest Miser.

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‍The billionaire, it seems, didn’t care about how she would be remembered. She left no libraries in her name, no university scholarships or charitable foundations like so many others.

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‍And the Press both in the UK and America, knew her as the ‘Witch of Wall Street.’ Despite being one of the richest women in the world she lived in extreme poverty, wearing one black dress, eating cold oatmeal, and refusing to use hot water, all while amassing a fortune.

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‍When she died 1916, the New York Times reported that she left $2.4 billion in today’s money.

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‍“Probably her life was happy,” the newspaper said. “At any rate, she had enough courage to live as she chose and to be as thrifty as she pleased.

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‍She was born Hetty Howland Robinson in 1834. Her delicate, retiring mother Abby was a Howland, and the Quaker Howlands were the most successful whaling family in New Bedford, Massachusetts, at a time when the nation ran on whale oil.

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‍Her father was a shrewd, hard-driving whaling businessman from Philadelphia, known as Edward “Black Hawk” Robinson who based his office in the docks. Hetty, an only child after the death of her infant brother, never visited the fine homes of the rich overlooking the harbour but grew up in buildings along the dockside.

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‍When her father died in 1865 with an estate totalling $90 million in today’s money, only a small portion of it was left directly to Hetty, 30. She knew that had she been a boy she would have taken over his fortune.

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‍It wrankled and she spent the rest of her life with an obsessive quest to prove that she could manage the family fortune as well as, if not better than any man.

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‍In 1867 she married businessman and investor Edward Green and bore two children, Ned and Sylvia.

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‍When Ned injured his leg in a sledging accident, miserly Hetty refused to pay the cost of having it treated and nursed it herself. It finally turned gangrenous and had to be amputated.

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‍Then, in 1885, her husband made some bad railroad investments and lost his money. Hetty turned to Wall Street and over the next 30 years, she built up a colossal fortune, buying and selling stocks and bonds, railroads, and gold mines.

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‍She lent money and, then through foreclosure, acquired buildings in New York, Chicago, Boston, and St. Louis. She bought low, sold high, and kept her calm through every panic.

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‍She could have lived in a mansion on Fifth Avenue’s millionaire row, instead she chose to lodge in cheap rooming houses across the river in Hoboken, New Jersey, under assumed names.

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‍Tales of her miserly life style were everywhere: she frantically had staff looking for two days for a lost two cents postage stamp; had a nasty row about having to pay a $2 dog licence; heated her oatmeal for lunch on the radiators at Wall Street banks, and instructed cleaners to wash only the bottoms of her skirts - the only parts dirtied by the muddy streets to save water bills.

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‍But in a financial panic in 1907, when New York ran so low on funds that it froze construction projects and stopped hiring police officers, Hetty’s loan of $1.1 million helped keep the government running.

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‍During the panic, J.P. Morgan organised a famous gathering of banking leaders in his home on East 36th Street. The meeting, which led to the establishment of the Federal Reserve, was male except for a lone woman who wore a black veil as she entered and left the building. Hetty.

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‍She died on July 3, 1916, aged 81, from a stroke while arguing about a maid’s pay.

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‍TERRY MANNERS

‍16 February 2016