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With Marlowe exorcised from her life, Natalie spent more time with Elvis Presley and his companions from Tennessee, who had taken over part of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel as their stomping grounds. Lamar Fike, a Presley pal with a rollicking Southern sense of humor, adored “the raving ingénue,” as he later described Natalie. “We used to call her the Mad Nat. Elvis and I thought it up. Natalie used to get so dramatic! I came in one day to his room at the Beverly Wilshire and she got up on the windowsill and opened the window up. And I said, ‘Elvis, Jesus Christ, she’s going to jump!’ And he said, ‘No, no,’ and then he said, ‘Nat, come and sit down and quit being so dramatic.’ And he was right. So we called her the Mad Nat.”
Her mother “pushed” the relationship with Presley, according to Hyatt. Maria visited Presley on his movie set with Natalie and struck up conversations with his mother, Gladys. Even Fahd liked Presley, according to Maria, who would remember her husband buying Elvis Presley records that fall. “Natalie was crazy about Elvis,” she claimed in later years. Natalie bought matching velvet shirts for herself and Presley, sneaking into movies with him throughout the late fall, finding him “complex and lonely,” not unlike herself. “Natalie was attracted to dark personalities,” Marlowe observed.
Her school friend Jackie, who was still friendly with Natalie, remembers Natalie telling her “what a polite, wonderful human being” Presley was, but “he was not what she wanted romantically.” Later in life, Natalie gave an interview to Presley biographer Albert Goldman, discussing her relationship with the singer:
He was the first person of my age group I had ever met who said to me: “How come you’re wearing makeup? Why do you want to go to New York? Why do you want to be on your own? Why don’t you want to stay home and be a sweet little girl? It’s nice to stay home.” We’d go to P.C. Brown’s and have a hot fudge sundae. We’d go to Hamburger Hamlet and have a burger and a Coke. He didn’t drink. He didn’t swear. He didn’t even smoke! . . . I thought it was really wild!
At the height of her friendship with Presley, in October, Natalie was sent to New York to appear in a live television drama called Carnival on NBC’s Kaiser Aluminum Hour, costarring Dennis Hopper, directed by George Roy Hill. Natalie played the daughter of a drunken carny worker who takes a job as a “cooch dancer” in a desperate bid to save her father’s job, then lies to cover for him. She would later refer to it as her best work as an actress, perhaps because she related to her character, who was supporting her alcoholic father.
Ironically, Scott Marlowe was NBC’s first choice to play Hopper’s role as the carnival barker in a tender romance with Natalie’s character. “I was doing a television show, and I couldn’t do it. My heart was wrenched.” Marlowe, who was still in contact with Natalie through “secret” phone calls she made to him through friends, watched her perform that night. “She was brilliant. The camera came in close and she had this big, big scene, she had to burst into tears—and she did it and she was brilliant. She burst right into tears. God, she was magnificent.” Daily Variety agreed with Marlowe, calling Natalie “touching and effective.”
She returned to Hollywood from her television triumph to begin dating an intense young actor she met before she left town, when she saw him perform onstage in End as a Man. Her companion that night was Ben Cooper, who recalls their reaction to actor Robert Vaughn, when they met him after the play at a small party: “Bob played a real rat, just a despicable bastard. And I told him, ‘If you don’t mind, I’d like to talk to you later; right now I still hate you.’ And he laughed and he said, ‘Thank you very much.’ He was just magnetic. You would hardly remember any of the other actors who were in the play. So when he and Natalie met, there was a lot of electricity.” Vaughn would say, “Being a reasonably sensitive fellow, it was apparent from the git-go that the girl and yours truly would see each other again—she had that look.”
By the time Natalie returned from New York, Vaughn had been signed to a two-picture-a-year deal with Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, and moved from a one-room apartment shared with his mother “into a magnificent three-story, ten-room penthouse on Orchid Avenue overlooking the lights of my newly discovered Hollywood.” Natalie introduced him to Hollywood’s haunts, as she earlier had Hopper. “My first Hollywood premiere was with Nat, who as a result of Rebel, was now the toast of Photoplay and Modern Screen, etcetera.” Vaughn simultaneously went out with Natalie’s friend Judi Meredith, “[and] since neither Judi or Natalie seemed to be concerned about the other’s role in my life—that life was good.”
Natalie was juggling Vaughn with Elvis Presley, who invited her to Graceland, his Memphis home, over Halloween. According to Marlowe, “She did a weekend, to make me jealous, with Elvis. That’s all it was about. She wanted to get back with me and so she took off with him.”
Natalie left town abruptly, without telling the studio or her new agency, William Morris, missing a publicity event and flying under an assumed name. Her “secret” visit to Graceland was captured by photographers moments after Nick Adams picked her up at the airport in Memphis, where she and Presley were stalked by fans everywhere they went: riding on his motorcycle, tooling around town in his Lincoln Continental, stopping at the Fairgrounds or for ice cream. Presley’s later friend Jerry Schilling remembers, “I was fourteen years old, playing touch football, and who should drive up but Elvis on a motorcycle, and who’s sitting behind him but Natalie Wood! All I could do was just stand there and stare.”
Presley allowed his fans to do almost anything, even look through his windows. He explained why to a bewildered Natalie, who recalled, “I hadn’t been around anyone who was religious. He felt he had been given this gift, this talent, by God. He didn’t take it for granted. He thought it was something that he had to protect. He had to be nice to people, otherwise, God would take it all away.”
Both Lana and Maria would later say that Natalie phoned home toward the end of her visit, asking Mud “in code” to call her back on the ruse that Warner Brothers needed her in Los Angeles. Presley’s friend Fike, who was in Memphis, claims that was “a lie,” that “Natalie really cared for Elvis,” though he acknowledges “it just didn’t work out” between them. “She just didn’t like the whole set-up, didn’t like the guys around, which most girls didn’t.” Faye Nuell, Natalie’s friend from Rebel, still a confidante, felt Natalie, who preferred “worldly” men, had always considered Presley more a friend than a boyfriend.
Natalie flew back to Hollywood from Memphis in tight toreador pants, clutching her stuffed tigers, greeted at the airport by Robert Vaughn and by photographers, eager to snap Elvis’ “new girlfriend.” Pictures of Natalie Wood, smiling ebulliently, waving to her fans, appeared in newspapers across the world the next day. Michael Zimring, her new William Morris agent, saw Natalie privately, “and when she came back she looked like a rat that died. I don’t think she’d been to sleep for a week.” Zimring took Natalie to task for leaving town without informing him or the studio, though he felt sorry for her. “I tell you, she had a tough family thing. She was a good kid. She was a little wild, but basically she really was a good kid. I really was fond of her. She took care of her family: I mean let’s face it, she supported them. Her father was a mess.”
Marlowe recalls, “She appeared at my door the following weekend,” still hoping to marry him. “She wanted to be married badly—to somebody—I know. I think she just wanted out—of that mother, and that relationship. And out of feeling suicidal so much.” Natalie and Marlowe gave it a last go, but it was “not meant to be,” they would both say. “Barbara Gould tried to get us back together, but we split up.”
In the end, Scott Marlowe, like Jimmy Williams, Natalie’s true loves, represented a too extreme break from her codependent relationship with Maria, and their shared Hollywood fantasy, movie star “Natalie Wood.”
Robert Vaughn briefly filled the void in Natalie’s life through November. He remembers her then as “a full blooming late teenager, with all the passion, humor, vulnerability and craziness that time suggests. She could also drink a Volga boatman under the table. She introduced me to the ‘way of the world’ in Hollywood’s last glamorous days, and I shall treasure our fleeting time upon that ‘wicked stage’ all of my days.” At the same time, Vaughn had a strange premonition about Natalie, a disturbing feeling that something was wrong. “Even then, I had some concern, based on her zest for life, that she might not realize her full ‘Biblical’ four score and ten, and said so to my friends.”
When Vaughn escorted Natalie to a party given by Elvis Presley that December at the Santa Monica Pier, which Presley had “bought out” for his friends for the evening, “Natalie, with profound sadness, stared at the black waters, and told me how deeply afraid she was of drowning.”
