Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [111]
But Elvis didn’t know she was a deeply disturbed girl, or that she was tormented by the conflict between her real self (born Natasha Zakharenko to Russian immigrants) and the alluring persona of Natalie Wood, a cocreation of Hollywood and her ambitious mother, Maria. Wood learned early to please the grown-ups, and the teenager, who had begun working in films at the age of six, had a wild-child reputation, drinking, casually falling in and out of relationships (like Elvis, she couldn’t stand to be alone), and using her sexuality to further her career. Elvis would eventually come to dub her “Mad Nat.”
The Colonel asked Byron to walk Natalie over to the soundstage, and “I could tell they were hot for each other the moment they met,” Raphael remembered. A devilish grin crossed Elvis’s face, and he invited Natalie to visit him in his suite at the posh Beverly Wilshire Hotel that night.
Although Elvis had been in Hollywood only a matter of weeks, his parties, attended by movie royalty and young fans alike, were becoming legendary, whether at the Knickerbocker or the more staid Beverly Wilshire, at the corner of Rodeo Drive and Wilshire Boulevard. Glen Glenn, an aspiring California country singer who became good friends with the band, found that “every time you went to see Elvis up at the Knickerbocker, there would always be two hundred or so girls out in front. They had a special guard that made sure that girls could not get inside the hotel unless they were actually staying there. They were standing out front, hoping Elvis would come out.”
Among them were sisters Sharon and Mary Jo Sheeley of tony Laguna Beach, California, both rabid Elvis fans. Sharon, the older of the two, looked at her sister one day “and just told her that we were going to Hollywood. It was very matter of fact with me.” Mary Jo remembered it the same way: “When she got her driver’s license, she came into my room and said, ‘Josie, come on! We’re going to meet Elvis.’ ”
When they arrived, they were surprised to find that “thousands” of girls had the same idea. “It wasn’t quite as easy as I had planned it out to be,” Sharon realized. “So I took [Mary Jo] home and said, ‘I’ve got to think of something better than this.’ ”
The following week Sharon put her hair up, slathered on a generous amount of makeup to look older than her sixteen years, and checked into the Knickerbocker Hotel, sneaking her sister in later. Now, with the first part of their mission accomplished, the Sheeley girls had only to meet Elvis. Sharon again led the way.
“On a very lucky occasion, when there was no guard on his floor, we knocked on his door and they opened [it]. The first thing I saw through the crack was Elvis sitting backward in a chair, straddling it. I looked into those gorgeous blue eyes of his, and I couldn’t believe that I was staring eye to eye with Elvis Presley. And he said, ‘Well, don’t just stand there. Come on in.’ ”
Sharon strode right into the room, but when she turned to her sister, Mary Jo “was paralyzed behind me. Her legs wouldn’t move. And he literally got up and walked over and picked her up.”
Now Elvis turned his full attention to fifteen-year-old Mary Jo. “He looked at me and he said, ‘Are you a goody-goody girl?’ And I said, ‘What’s a goody-goody girl?’ He said, ‘Never mind,’ and with that he gave me the longest, most passionate, memorable kiss I’ve ever had. Then he looked me straight in the eyes and said, ‘There. If that gets you pregnant, I’ll marry you.’ ”
He invited the teenagers to stay and have hamburgers, and said if they were in town the following week to come back up again. From there, “It just became a regular thing,” said Sharon. “Every weekend, we would go and hang out with Elvis Presley.” Sharon later parlayed her music contacts into