Several months later, in early 1972, she ran into her ex-husband, Robert Wagner, at a party, and they resumed their relationship. Three months after her divorce from Richard Gregson was final, Natalie Wood remarried Robert Wagner in Malibu on July 16, 1972. Their daughter, Courtney, was born on March 9, 1974, and their marriage lasted until the premature end of Natalie’s life. Not wanting to repeat the experience of stressfully juggling marriage and career, Natalie focused the majority of her attention on her husband and daughter and only accepted the television version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Laurence Olivier in 1976 when her husband was signed to star right along with her.
In 1979 she won a Best Actress Golden Globe Award for the miniseries From Here to Eternity, but her next two feature films were unsuccessful both critically and financially. Eager to get her career back on track, Natalie had high hopes for her next film commitment, a science fiction thriller called Brainstorm.
Location work in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Brainstorm finished at the end of October 1981, and the cast and crew returned to Los Angeles in November to film interior scenes. On November 28, Natalie, Robert Wagner, and Natalie’s Brainstorm costar Christopher Walken sailed to Catalina Island aboard the Wagners’ yacht Splendor. Late on the night of November 29, Natalie disappeared from the yacht. Frantic and distraught, Wagner alerted the Coast Guard, who, after an all-night search, found the body of Natalie Wood two hundred yards offshore, still wrapped in the down-filled coat and wool sweater she’d been wearing when she was last seen onboard.
Hollywood and the tabloids shifted into high gear, breathlessly sharing every possible sensational story that could be dreamed up about a sudden death, a yacht in the dark of night, and three Hollywood stars. But after the autopsy and a police investigation, the sad conclusion was a simple one: Natalie, after several glasses of wine, had gone to the yacht’s dinghy, either to board it or to secure it more tightly to the side of the boat; intoxicated, she slipped overboard. She was a poor swimmer with a lifelong terror of dark water, so she panicked, tried unsuccessfully to climb into the dinghy with her heavy, wet coat and sweater pulling her down, drifted too far away from the yacht for her cries to be heard, and drowned in the Pacific near the Catalina coast.
In the aftermath of Natalie Wood’s shockingly premature death at the age of forty-three, Brainstorm was finished with a revised ending, a stand-in, and some sleight-of-hand with camera angles. It was released in 1983 and was neither a critical nor a commercial success, but it’s still valued as the last work of one of Hollywood’s favorite, most memorable stars. She was laid to rest in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery.
From Francine
Natalie made the transition from earth to the Other Side instantaneously, but she was understandably stunned to find herself emerging from the tunnel after such a sudden death. She was welcomed Home by her old friend and costar Steve McQueen (a new arrival himself) and by a tiny woman who, as all spirits do here, greeted her as she’d appeared on earth to make sure Natalie would recognize her: long steel-gray hair pulled tightly up into a topknot, large deep-set eyes, a rather prominent nose and thin lips. (Natalie says her family will know immediately who the woman is from this description.) As emotionally sensitive as Natalie was during her last lifetime, she was watched carefully during her time at the Scanning Machine, but she made a quick, peaceful adjustment to being Home and was so eager to resume her life on the Other Side that cocooning wasn’t necessary.
While no one on earth is allowed to see the chart they wrote for any given lifetime until they’ve returned from that lifetime, there are those who are uniquely able to remember fragments of their charts without being aware that that’s what they’re doing. Natalie was one of those people. She knew at the age of ten, on seeing Robert Wagner for the first time, that he was the man she’d charted herself to marry—not once, but twice. And her lifelong fear of dark water was a memory of having written an Exit Point into her chart involving dark water. In fact, if you talk to those who were closest to her, you’ll find that she was often extraordinarily intuitive. It was part of her strength and part of her fragility.
She wants her daughters to know that not a day goes by when she doesn’t visit them, especially when they’re “alone” in their cars. She says they taught her about love and priorities, and nothing in this world meant more to her than being their mother. She also wants to assure them that she’s at peace about the night she died and that “everyone who matters knows everything they need to know about what happened.” Beyond that, there’s nothing more to say, and she’s very happy that they were able to move on and grow into such successful, beautiful, interesting women.
Her life at Home is, of course, blissfully busy. She loves to socialize with her many cherished friends from her most recent lifetime—Steve McQueen, James Dean, Elvis Presley, Sal Mineo, Bette Davis, and a British woman named Judy Fox, to whom she seems especially close—as well as loved ones from her twenty-three past incarnations. She both performs and teaches ballet, and she’s also training to work in the cocooning chambers. She has no intention of incarnating again, but she does intend to become a Spirit Guide for an acquaintance on the Other Side who’s preparing for another lifetime and has chosen life themes identical to those Natalie just experienced, Rejection and Aesthetic Pursuits.
Elvis Presley
On January 8, 1935, in a two-room house in Tupelo, Mississippi, built by Vernon Elvis Presley, his wife, Gladys Smith Presley, gave birth to identical twin boys. The first, Jessie Garon, was stillborn. Thirty-five minutes after Jessie’s sad arrival, the second twin, Elvis Aron, was born, healthy, thriving, and, as the saying goes, “ready to rock and roll.” The Presleys were a close-knit family, surrounded by aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins in Tupelo, and Vernon worked odd jobs to keep his wife and son above the poverty line as best he could. But when he was incarcerated for eight months for check fraud, Gladys lost their house, and she and Elvis moved in with relatives. Elvis was first exposed to gospel music at the Assembly of God Church he attended with relatives, and it resonated in him throughout his life, as did his family’s favorite country music radio station and the blues sung on the porches and street corners of the predominantly black neighborhood where the Presleys briefly lived.
Elvis was ten years old when he gave his first professional performance. Standing on a chair so that he could reach the microphone, he sang a song called “Old Shep” for a talent contest at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show and won the $5 fifth-place prize. On his eleventh birthday he was disappointed to learn that instead of the bicycle he was hoping for, his parents presented him with a more affordable $12.95 guitar. His pastor and two of his uncles gave him his first guitar lessons, and the somewhat shy loner found a good, reliable friend in the guitar he began bringing to school to practice with during lunch and recess.
In November 1948 Vernon and Gladys and their son moved to Memphis, Tennessee, hoping for better job opportunities. They settled into low-income housing, and all three of them worked where they could while Elvis attended L. C. Humes High School. He was rarely seen without his guitar and began spending as much time as possible on Beale Street, the heart of blues music in Memphis. He loved the music and the clothing, just as he continued to love all the gospel and country performers he sought out. Not only was his musical style taking shape, but his personal style was evolving as well, with flashy clothing, sideburns, and long slicked-back hair that set him apart from his high-school classmates and offered a glimpse into the singular legend he would become.
In August 1953, two months after getting his high-school diploma, Elvis walked into Sun Records in Memphis, wanting to buy enough studio time to record two songs: “My Happiness” and “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin.” Sam Phillips, who owned Sun Records, made a note after the session that read, “Elvis Presley. Good ballad singer. Hold.”
From there, after some rejections, failed auditions, a truck-driving job, assurances that he’d never
make it as a singer, and accusations of being a “danger to the security of the United States” because of the way he kept time to the music with his hips when he performed, by the end of 1956 Elvis Presley had a manager (music promoter “Colonel” Tom Parker), a contract with RCA Records, his first number-one hit record (“Heartbreak Hotel”), and a string of national television appearances that culminated in three triumphant appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show. At the end of his third appearance, Ed Sullivan informed his audience and the country that Elvis was “a real decent, fine boy,” giving his coveted blessing for the superstardom that was well on its way.
In 1957 Elvis bought Graceland, a gated mansion on 13.8 acres of land in Memphis, and proudly moved there with his parents. Graceland continued to be his home for the rest of his life, and it was at Graceland in 1958, while Elvis was serving in the army, that his beloved mother, Gladys, died.
It was also while serving in the army, stationed in Germany from 1958 until March 1960, that Elvis was introduced to karate, amphetamines, and a beautiful fourteen-year-old girl named Priscilla Beaulieu, whom he brought home to Graceland when his army service ended in 1960 and married in Las Vegas on May 1, 1967. Exactly nine months later Priscilla gave birth to their only child, a daughter named Lisa Marie. The marriage ended in divorce on August 18, 1972, with Elvis and Priscilla agreeing to share custody of Lisa Marie.
Contrary to Elvis’s fears, his popularity hadn’t diminished during his absence in the military, and he recorded some of his greatest hits in the early 1960s. Unfortunately, a barrage of ill-conceived, thrown-together movies that Elvis found embarrassing—twenty-seven of them between 1961 and 1970—compromised his credibility and his popularity. But in 1968 Elvis starred in what came to be called his “Comeback Special,” a brilliantly conceived and executed TV hour featuring his first “live” appearance since 1961. It was NBC’s highest-rated show of the season, it was magic, Elvis Presley never looked or sounded better, and it triggered an unprecedented career resurrection as requests for live performances poured in from around the world.
By the early 1970s, despite spectacularly successful tours and recording sessions, Elvis’s health began to decline as he battled both a weight problem and dangerous prescription drug addictions. His performances became increasingly unreliable, sometimes bordering on incoherent, and he often seemed nervous and self-conscious, aware of his ballooning weight and in visible emotional pain. When he wasn’t onstage, he would isolate himself in his room with a handful of insiders, where he was paranoid, germophobic, and obsessive.
On June 26, 1977, Elvis Presley gave what was to be his final performance at the Market Square Arena in Indianapolis. He was scheduled to leave Memphis again to begin another tour on the night of August 16. But that afternoon, his fiancée, Ginger Alden, found him unresponsive on the floor of his Graceland bathroom. He was pronounced dead at 3:30 p.m. at Baptist Memorial Hospital. While a sanitized autopsy listed the cause of death as cardiac arrhythmia, it was later established during a criminal investigation of Elvis’s primary physician, Dr. Nichopoulos, a.k.a. Dr. Nick, that, even though Dr. Nick was ultimately exonerated for criminal liability in Elvis’s death, “in the first eight months of 1977 alone he had prescribed more than 10,000 doses of sedatives, amphetamines and narcotics, all in Elvis’s name.” Dr. Nichopoulos’s license was permanently revoked during the 1990s.
Elvis Presley and his cherished mother, Gladys, are buried side by side at Graceland’s Meditation Garden, and today the only house in America visited by more tourists per year than Graceland is the White House.
From Sylvia
You could have knocked me over with a feather when, less than twenty-four hours after Elvis Presley died, the San Francisco Chronicle called to ask if Francine could possibly contact his spirit and give them the results of her interview with him. I was hardly the only psychic interviewed by the press on the subject of Elvis that day, but I wasn’t particularly famous in 1977, and I certainly wasn’t a renowned Elvis Presley fan. In fact, all I really knew about him was that he was a rock-and-roll singer, he had a beautiful voice when he sang ballads, and he was drop-dead gorgeous in his prime. But if the San Francisco Chronicle wanted comments from Francine about him, I was happy to oblige if she was. As it turned out, she was so cooperative that we made the front page of the Chronicle, which announced that a psychic named Sylvia Brown (I hadn’t added the e yet) “through her spiritual guide, an Aztec-Inca spirit named Francine,” had contacted him less than twenty-four hours after his death.
I was “absent,” of course, during the trance with Francine, but I’m happy to pass along the information I heard on the tapes of that interview. It’s worth adding, by the way, that he was able to go into this much detail precisely because she was talking to him so soon after he’d arrived back on the Other Side, when his memories of his just-ended lifetime on earth were so fresh. It’s not surprising that the more settled we get again into our blissful lives at Home, the less we think about all but the most essential parts of the lives we left behind.
Elvis died in a very, very small room, he told Francine, and he was immediately aware that he’d passed over. He’d had a headache earlier that day, and his back hurt, and he went into this small room with a book. He’d had problems with his lower intestine for the previous two and a half years, problems he’d mentioned to a few friends, particularly a “John” and a “Charlie,” and he was on medication and steroids. His death, though, was unintentional and accidental, and he had a quick, easy trip Home, which was no surprise to him thanks to his devout lifelong faith in God.
He was met on the Other Side by his mother, Gladys, whom he affectionately nicknamed “Gladiola” here on earth, his twin brother, Jesse, and a friend named Chuck. His life at Home was filled with music. His voice was even richer than it was on earth, and he and countless other transcended musicians loved giving grand, celebrated concerts. He said that although he was best known as a rock-and-roll singer, his real musical passion and inspiration was gospel music, but his favorite of all the songs he ever recorded was “Heartbreak Hotel.”
He regretted that he wasn’t as skilled at loving individual people as he was at loving large anonymous groups of them, although the greatest pride, joy, and accomplishment in his lifetime was his daughter, Lisa Marie. As much as he loved Priscilla, and he did, he felt their marriage was doomed, because his lifestyle didn’t allow them to spend enough private, “normal” time together.
Because he was aware of sixteen separate attempts on his life, he spent many years feeling paranoid and fearful. Relaxation and sleep seemed impossible without medication. He said he had a premonition of his death six months before it happened, and he thought of his last performances of “My Way” as his way of saying farewell to his fans.
He passed along a few personal messages to his father, Vernon. One was the name “Ruta May.” Another was a game they played when Elvis was a child, in which one of them would start a nursery rhyme and the other one would finish it.
I don’t mind telling you that I couldn’t have been more flattered when, a few weeks after the Chronicle article appeared, both Vernon Presley and Elvis’s friend Charlie Hodge called to validate the information Francine passed along.
In preparation for this book, I asked Francine about one more piece of information she shared in that article, that she said Elvis had already planned his next incarnation. He was going to be a singer again, this time with light hair and light eyes, and he would be born in 2004. What follows is her 2010 update.
From Francine
Elvis began his new incarnation in late November 2004. His hair is blond, although it will darken as he gets older, and his eyes are blue, as he chose them to be. He was born in France and lives on a vineyard there with his parents and his two brothers. The family travels to Italy a few times a year to visit relatives there.
He will grow up to have a very beautiful singing voice, but he will not be a famous singer or recording artist again. He will de
vote his voice and his talent as a composer to his devout Catholicism, writing hymns and performing them solely for church services and special events. He feels that he sacrificed depth and introspection for fame and wealth in his last life, and in this new life he intends to contribute to this world in quiet, thoughtful, charitable anonymity by becoming a monk and working with the poor throughout the French countryside.
Dean Martin
The singer and actor nicknamed the “king of cool” was born Dino Paul Crocetti on June 7, 1917, in Steubenville, Ohio. His parents, Gaetano and Angela, were Italian immigrants, and neither Dean nor his older brother, Bill, spoke a word of anything but Italian before they started school. School didn’t hold much interest for Dean, and he dropped out of Steubenville High School in the tenth grade. A whirlwind of jobs followed immediately; he was a bootleg liquor deliverer, a shoe-shine boy, a blackjack dealer, a steel mill worker, even briefly a fifteen-year-old boxer called “Kid Crochet.” He also became a skilled croupier in illegal casinos, where he was exposed to a variety of entertainers and began thinking he might have what it took to be one of them. One night in August 1934 some friends convinced him to go onstage and sing, and from then on a lot of local Steubenville bands found themselves accompanying the young, talented crooner “Dino Martini.” In 1938, while singing at the State Restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, he was “discovered” and hired as a featured vocalist by Cleveland bandleader Sammy Watkins, who convinced Dino Martini to change his name to Dean Martin.