Robert Wagner is a long-time Hollywood legend, known for multiple movie and television roles. Just as famously, Wagner was known as the husband to child star Natalie Wood - the little girl who charmed the world as cynical, gum-chewing Susan Walker in Miracle on 34th Street. Wagner starred TV shows like It Takes a Thief and Hart to Hart.

In his new memoir Pieces of My Heart, Wagner reveals that he enjoyed an affair with another screen goddess. I actually know a good deal about Wagner, Wood and even how Christopher Walken figures into their strange story.

In the novel, Wagner reveals that he carried on, highly in secret, with silver screen legend Barbara Stanwyck for four years. I actually watched a Stanwyck flick just last night - and there are plenty to choose from. She was a Hollywood powerhouse for many years, one of the few leading ladies who could carry a movie even with relatively unknown male co-stars.

I know what you’re thinking, but I’m not 70. I just happen to be a fan of strong scripts, great plot and few special effects. This rules out a great many movies made in the last two decades…so I just go to the beginnings of Hollywood film history.

According to Wagner, the pair met on the set of Titanic in 1953 when he was a young 22. Stanwyck, a silent film queen before she became a leading lady in the golden days of Hollywood, was a 45-year-old divorcee.

The two kept their relationship under wraps, sharing their affair with close friends like Nancy Sinatra (the wife, not the daughter) and Spencer Tracy (who enjoyed an extramarital affair with Katherine Hepburn through eight movies and multiple decades).

“I would say she gave me self-esteem,” wrote Wagner in the book. He says eventually, Stanwyck ended the relationship. “I would always have been Mr. Stanwyck,” Wagner penned, “and we both knew it.”

Wagner did publicly date other actresses, including Joan Collins and Debbie Reynolds. He married Wood, then 19, in 1957. They divorced in 1962…and remarried in 1972. Nine years later, a series of events would lead to the creation of one of the greatest mysteries in Hollywood memory.

One fateful evening in November, Wagner, Wood and Christopher Walken went sailing around Catalina Island. At the time, Walken was playing opposite Wood in the film Brainstorm. According to many (including the actress herself, who spoke of the condition in interviews), Wood had a lifelong fear of water after a near-drowning she experienced on set as a child. Yet sometime in the evening, Wood apparently climbed into one of the yacht’s small boasts - alone - and drowned to her death.

The event was ruled as an accident by investigators, though many cite some seemingly strange facts to support sinister suspicions. For instance, no one on the yacht reported Wood’s disappearance until she’d been missing for an hour and a half. Will Wagner’s new memoir address Wood, their life together and her death?

I have no doubt it will.