Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [120]
Natalie’s visit exacerbated everything with Gladys, and it was obvious even to people who didn’t know her well. When Wink Martindale and his TV cohost, Susie Bancroft, went out to the house during Nick and Natalie’s visit, “We just sang and stood around a lot. . . . I remember his mother being there and seeming so out of place.”
It just made Gladys wild. She complained to her sister Lillian that Natalie was “too fond of the men—didn’t even finish her meal when Nick Adams and the boys came over.” She was so upset that she vented to Barbara, too.
“She didn’t like provocative women, and she called me and said Natalie was walking around the house in a flimsy nightgown in front of the men who were working on the house. She thought that was thoroughly bad behavior, and said she would be glad when Natalie left.”
Natalie felt the same way. Three days into what was supposed to be a weeklong stay, she aborted her visit, flying back to L.A. in tight toreador pants with Nick at her side. Robert Vaughn met her at the airport, and photographers snapped pictures of Elvis’s “new girlfriend.” Her William Morris agent, Michael Zimring, said, “She looked like a rat that [had] died. I don’t think she’d been to sleep for a week.”
In her book, Natalie, a Memoir by Her Sister, Lana Wood recounts that the family helped Natalie cook up the sudden departure. She’d called home moaning that Elvis’s mother was domineering and jealous. “Gladys has wrecked everything,” Natalie said. “I don’t have a chance. Get me out of this, and fast.” It was agreed that Maria would call Natalie back and ask her to come home because of an emergency.
The romance was over.
“God, it was awful,” Natalie told Lana later. “He can sing, but he can’t do much else.”
After that, whenever Natalie’s name came up, Elvis laughed. “Heaven help us!” he said. “That girl is crazy!”
However, Elvis would have no shortage of entertaining friends, as two days after Natalie’s departure, he asked Cliff Gleaves to move into the house as a “gofer” to make things easier for himself and his parents. Gladys accepted him but wished her son would be more selective of his companions. A ne’er-do-well, Gleaves was a flunky deejay from Jackson, Tennessee, and a pal of Dewey Phillips. He looked as if he slept in his clothes. But he had an offbeat and riotous sense of humor, and he wasn’t beyond trying any sort of con—gypping restaurateurs out of a huge steak dinner, for example—which amused Elvis no end. In the future, Elvis would suspend him from the group for outrageous grifting and unspeakable hooliganisms, only to take him back. But for now, he had his place.
Through Cliff, Elvis became reaquainted with Lamar Fike, a three-hundred-pound Memphian who’d tried to break into radio through George Klein. Fike, who lived at the YMCA, was comical-looking—he’d soon start wearing yellow cowboy boots—but he had a first-rate mind, and in time Elvis would invite him into the entourage.
For now, Elvis was still traveling with his cousin Gene Smith, though Bitsy Mott, the Colonel’s brother-in-law and a former professional baseball player, had joined him as head of security. On November 8, 1956, the three of them boarded a train for Las Vegas. Elvis needed to shake off all the voodoo from Nick and Natalie, as well as his jitters about Love Me Tender, which would open in New York on November 15.
He stayed at the New Frontier, where he had played earlier in the year, and immediately began seeing nineteen-year-old Marilyn Evans, a showgirl at the hotel. He’d walked into the employees-only coffee shop at the casino and sat at her table. “Wow,” she thought. “He’s beautiful—really, truly.”
Within an hour, he had slipped her a scrawled note on the back of a