Long before any of them met Robert Wagner, Natalie Wood, Jill St. John and Stefanie Powers were little girls in tights at the same Hollywood dance studio. Two of them became Robert Wagner’s wives, Wood twice over and St. John since 1990, while Powers spent five seasons as his wife Jennifer on Hart to Hart. The three of them took ballet together as children, a coincidence People revisited this week and one that Powers has been marveling at for years.
Wagner is 96 now and still married to St. John, who is 86, while Powers celebrated her 84th on today, November 2. The way Powers tells it, nobody in that ballet room could have guessed where the next 70 years would lead.
How Did Three Future Stars End Up At The Same Barre?
The name that turns up in all three women’s histories is Panaieff, the Hollywood dance teacher whose children’s classes they attended. Jill St. John, born Jill Arlyn Oppenheim on August 19, 1940, was a member of the Michael Panaieff Children’s Ballet Company alongside Wood and Powers, and TV Insider’s profile of her says that is where she met and befriended the two future stars. Natalie Wood’s Instagram account, which her estate runs, shared a photo from those days with a simple caption: “As children Natalie and Stefanie Powers both attended the Michel Panaieff Dance Studio.”
Powers, born Stefania Federkiewicz in Hollywood on November 2, 1942, got there through her mother. She told the South China Morning Post that her mother loved ballet and always had classical music playing at home, so the little girl danced around the house until she was old enough to be taken to ballet school. Wood, born in San Francisco on July 20, 1938, was the oldest of the three, and she was already famous at 8 as the doubting little girl in Miracle on 34th Street.
The girls grew up and went their separate ways, and one of them would find Wagner long before the others did.
Why Did Natalie Wood Marry Robert Wagner Twice?
Wagner, born in Detroit on February 10, 1930, was a young Fox contract player when he and Wood fell for each other. They married on December 28, 1957, in Scottsdale, Arizona, and divorced on April 27, 1962. Neither one quite let go. A decade later they married again on July 16, 1972, aboard a boat off Malibu, and this time the marriage lasted the rest of her life.
Powers had her own first brush with the couple during that first marriage. At 15 she was hired as a dancer for West Side Story, and she told ABC News in 2013 that the rehearsals were going on every day “and then, one day, in walked the two most beautiful people in the world, real movie stars Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood.” The production soon let the teenager go because of the limits on a minor’s working hours.
Wood died on November 29, 1981, when she drowned off Catalina Island during a Thanksgiving weekend trip. She was 43. Wagner was left raising daughters Natasha and Courtney, and the woman who helped him through the years that followed was another girl from that ballet class.
What Brought Jill St. John Back Into His Life?
St. John had become a star in her own right by then. She played Tiffany Case opposite Sean Connery in the James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever in 1971, and she had known Wagner socially since the late 1950s. The two began dating on Valentine’s Day 1982 and took their time. They married on May 26, 1990, in Pacific Palisades and have long made their home in Aspen, Colorado.
The marriage is now 36 years old, longer than either of his marriages to Wood. Earlier this month, Wagner shared what keeps his marriage to Jill St. John going, crediting a lively curiosity about life and about each other. That leaves the third girl from the ballet class, the one who only married him on television.
What Does Stefanie Powers Make Of The Coincidence Today?
Powers and Wagner starred as Jonathan and Jennifer Hart from 1979 to 1984, and they came back for eight Hart to Hart TV movies in the 1990s. If you watched it on ABC, you remember how easily they laughed together, and Wagner told ABC News in 2013 that the studio actually complained. “We had so much joy that the main office came down and said they didn’t want us to be together because we would laugh,” he said. Powers lost her partner William Holden in November 1981, about two weeks before Wood died, and she told the Daily Beast in 2019 that she and Wagner leaned on each other. “I like to think we held each other up, which bonded us as human beings,” she said.
The ballet class still amazes her. “Who in the world would ever predict that in one ballet class there would be three people” who ended up married to Robert Wagner, she asked ABC News in 2013. She put it even more plainly to the South China Morning Post, wondering what the chances were of “three young ladies in one ballet class who would all wind up being married to the same man.” Two of them married him for real, she noted, and she married him on screen.
In February, Powers was at Wagner’s side for his 96th birthday, a visit we covered when the Hart to Hart stars reunited. She has told People the bond is family now.
“He’s like my brother,” she said. “He’s a tremendous part of my life, and I love him dearly.”
Three little girls once learned to point their toes in the same Hollywood studio, and all these decades later the man who links them still has two of them close by, one as his wife of 36 years and one as the TV wife who calls him her brother.
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