A former child actress, she had blossomed into an 18-year-old sweater girl and Oscar-nominated actress by the time she met Elvis in 1956. However, in her following comments in the San Francisco News on October 14, 1956, she sounded more like a normal 14-year-old girl with a crush on Elvis.
Elvis
The King got all shook up when he dated Natalie Wood.
As a traffic light turned green, Elvis Presley gunned the engine of his Harley Davidson, causing his passenger, Natalie Wood, to hold her head scarf more tightly. At the height of the singer’s early stardom he’d brought his famous new girlfriend home to Memphis, Tenn. — but it didn’t work out the way either expected.
Intrigued by 21-year-old Elvis’ music and image, Natalie, then 18, had asked her Rebel Without a Cause co-star Dennis Hopper to introduce them. She was charmed by their first dates. “To go to the movies, he bought out the theater,” Natalie’s sister Lana Wood tells Closer. “That’s not what she was used to.”
Elvis, meanwhile, was starstruck by Natalie, a former child actress. “She was in Miracle on 34th Street when he was a little boy,” Ray Connolly, author of Being Elvis: A Lonely Life, tells Closer. The singer invited her home to impress his parents, but his mother Gladys soured on the actress quickly. “Natalie wore a very flimsy nightgown around the house,” Connolly says. “Gladys was like, ‘Not in my house!’ ”
Natalie, meanwhile, found Elvis’ close relationship with Gladys troubling. “His mother said something like, ‘Come and sit on Mama’s lap,’” says Lana. “They were very affectionate, and it bothered Natalie. She called and asked our mom to make up a story about why she had to come home.”
Their brief romance ended with no regrets. “Later, he called her ‘Mad Nat,’ I think for how angry she got,” Connolly says. Natalie also put the trip behind her. “There were people that she idolized,” says Lana, “Elvis was not one of them.” — By Louise A. Barile, reporting by Amanda Champagne-Meadows
“Gladys was embarrassed,” says Connolly. “She didn’t like the idea of this fast Hollywood girl with her son.”