Natalie Wood – a lamb to the slaughter

One of Hollywood’s darkest rumours from decades back has been given credence with a claim that Natalie Wood was, as suspected, sexually assaulted by Kirk Douglas in her teens. Her sister in a memoir says she was waiting outside in a car with her mother outside Douglas’s LA hotel suite into which the young Natalie had been despatched by her stage-mother-from-hell in the hope of gaining career advancement. She returned later dishevelled and upset and was told by her mother to “su