Before I met him, I had an earful of Elvis one day from Natalie Wood. She was tough, very young, starry-eyed and burningly ambitious. All the beaux were after her like a pack of hound dogs—Nicky Hilton, Lance Reventlow, Jimmy Dean, Nicky Adams, Johnny Grant, Dennis Hopper, Bob Neal, and as many more. But she was crazy for Elvis. She has every record he ever made.
She wasn’t only crazy for him. She was mad for stuffed toy tigers, including one that played “Ach du Lieber Augustine.” She wouldn’t ride on a plane without taking aboard, to read during the flight, a wad of unopened “good luck” notes written by her friends saying how glad they were that she’d arrived safely. She also took some tigers along as talismans. She went through a phase of wearing nothing but black, clear down to all her underwear. She drove a decorator way out of his mind by ordering black drapes and black furniture for her bedroom, where rugs and walls were chalk white. At that time, she was going on eighteen years old, all but four of them spent making movies.
“My father said he didn’t want his child to be an actress,” she once told me, “but my mother took me on a train to Hollywood to see Irving Pichel, who gave me a bit in Happy Land, on location in Santa Rosa. In my scene I had to drop an ice-cream cone and cry.”
There was no turning back after that. She used to pose in the darkness of movie theaters because her mother, youthful-looking Mrs. Maria Gurdin, an ex-ballet dancer, used to pretend the cameras that ground away in the last fade-out of the newsreel were focused on Natalie. By the time she was eight she had appeared in court, calm and collected, to squeeze a pay increase, up to $1000 a week, from her studio.
The build-up toward an earful of Elvis began at breakfast in the new Hilton hotel in Mexico City. A crowd of us had gone down for its opening, including Nicky Hilton and Bob Neal, who qualified in trumps for the phrase beloved of society gossip columnists, “a millionaire playboy.” Over coffee, he came in and whispered that he’d just slashed every tire on young Hilton’s automobile, “so Natalie will have to ride with me.”
Limousines were to take us to catch a plane home to Los Angeles. But Nicky foxed Bob. He took another car, and Natalie, to the airport. If either of the two swains thought he’d furthered his cause, he was dead wrong. En route, we landed for twenty-five minutes to refuel, and I went with Natalie to the waiting room, where a mammoth jukebox stood waiting to be fed. Like a thirsty traveler who’s reached the oasis, she pumped nickels and dimes into the maw of the thing to make it play Presley nonstop from the moment we arrived until we left.
She got as far as riding on the back of Elvis’ motorcycle and staying with Elvis at his home “because I wanted a vacation and a rest—his parents were there all the time.” But the passion soon faded. “Since he’s in town, why don’t you see him?” I asked her soon after her return.
She shrugged. “He’s busy and I’m working.” Did she think the vogue for him would last? She shrugged again. “That depends on how he does in his next picture.” Within a matter of weeks she had married Robert Wagner.
This pair of newlyweds made lovebirds look like scorpions. This was the couple that invented “togetherness.” In private or in public made no difference; they held hands, kissed, clutched each other in an altogether nauseating display of coltish affection. The fan magazines drooled over Bob and Natalie as the symbol of all young lovers. They bought a boat and painted it together. They bought a $175,000 house with marble floors and went into debt together.
When Warners suspended her for eighteen months, she sat out her time on the sets of Bob’s pictures, nuzzling him between takes. The marriage lasted three years. In that time, the career of Bob Wagner, who started out as a caddie carrying clubs for Bing Crosby and Spencer Tracy at a Beverly Hills country club, slowed down considerably, while his wife’s took wings. Togetherness turned into that delight of the divorce attorneys, “mutual incompatibility,” and Natalie cut fan-magazine interviews out of her life completely.