Robert J. Wagner: "Number Two"

Actor Robert J. Wagner has been active in Hollywood for nearly six decades. His memorable work includes A Kiss before Dying, The Longest Day, The Pink Panther, the Austin Powers series of spy spoofs, and many others. He also starred in three popular television series: It Takes a Thief; Switch; and Hart to Hart and has been featured on the current popular sitcom Two and a Half Men.

In Wagner’s recently published memoir, Pieces of My Heart: A Life (2008), released twenty-seven years after the mysterious death of his wife, screen star Natalie Wood, Wagner tells for the first time his story of what happened on the night of Wood’s death. Wagner also reveals his clandestine love affair with Barbara Stanwyck when she was forty-five and he only twenty-two and just getting started in Hollywood. Their romance lasted four years.

But to really know the man, let’s first understand Robert Wagner's earliest memories and bring to light his worldview.

Please vote for the one choice that best represents Robert Wagner's worldview... and thank you for participating!

Robert Wagner remembers….

1. When I was little, I stuck something in an electrical socket and blew out every outlet in the house. My father was in the bathroom shaving, and he came roaring out, grabbed me, put me over his knee, spanked me with a hair brush, then threw me off his lap for this terrible thing I had done.

2. When I was seven, my father took me to the train station in Detroit and tipped the porter $10.00 to make sure the package – his son – arrived safely. On my coat was a tag: “Deliver this boy to Mrs. Pierce, Hollywood Military Academy; Hollywood, California." As soon as the train pulled out of the station, I ripped the tag off my coat.

3. My father has opened a checking account for me so that I could pay my expenses on the trip. I remember that in Albuquerque I went into a souvenir shop and bought an antique gun so I could protect myself against the marauding Indians I was sure would attack the train at some point.

4. I was sitting under this tree when I was a little kid on a golf course, and I looked down the fairway and I saw these four gentlemen that I’d seen in the movies for so many years – Clark Gable, Fred Astaire, Randolph Scott, and Cary Grant – walking down the fairway, you know, and I looked at these men – and I thought…God, I want to be one of them. That’s what I want to be.

5. Once when I was twelve or thirteen, I took a BB gun and shot all the lights out in the tunnel of the country club at Bel-Air and generally embarrassed my father by being a smart-ass. The country club incident made him close his fists and go after me – again – but a couple of other men held him back.

Robert Wagner's worldview is...
1. I am an actor.
2. I write the lines.
3. I cast the players.
4. I direct the scene.