Excerpts from Natalie Wood: The Complete Biography by Suzanne Finstad.
One day while they were at the commissary, Frank Sinatra walked in, preparing for his next picture, Young at Heart. Sinatra either approached Natalie, or her mother sent her over to introduce herself. Maria lunged at the opportunity for Natalie to meet Sinatra, who had just won an Academy Award for From Here to Eternity, increasing his status in Hollywood. Sinatra was taken with Natalie, and got “a kick” out of Maria, inviting them to a party at his house. Mud eagerly accepted, whispering to Natalie afterward that she would let her go alone, urging Natalie to get close to Sinatra “because it would be good for her career.” Mud had no qualms that he was separated from his wife, the tempestuous Ava Gardner, or that he was thirty-eight to Natalie’s fifteen. “Her mother was a pimp,” as Scott Marlowe, Natalie’s later boyfriend, brutally assessed. Lana was too young to know about their mother pushing Natalie onto Sinatra, but “that wouldn’t surprise me. To my mom, if you were a movie star, then you were valuable.”
Natalie returned to the classroom at Republic, spilling her amazing secret to her TV brother, who recalls, “Natalie herself could not even believe this permission,” jumping at the chance “to do something without her mother.” She shared the confidence with Mary Ann, who was astonished even Maria would send Natalie alone, at fifteen, to a party at Frank Sinatra’s house. “She literally threw her to the lions.” The day after the party, Natalie arrived at the studio school embarrassed, telling Bobby she had something to confess. Natalie had consumed quantities of wine at Sinatra’s house, and in the course of the evening, told Sinatra about “Clyde,” the code name for penis Bobby had coined to fool Natalie’s mother. Sinatra was so amused, he and his friends had incorporated “Clyde” into their hipster slang. Natalie felt guilty because she had taken credit for the word. “Here’s the kind of person Natalie was. She said that my friendship was very important to her. She was going to see Sinatra that evening, and if I wanted, she would tell Sinatra that I invented the word.” Bobby laughed it off. Some months later, he turned on the radio and heard Sinatra singing a tune called “Clyde’s Song.” The singer was quoted in magazines saying Clyde was his “code word” for someone he didn’t trust. “Sinatra and his Rat Pack gang started using the ‘Clyde’ word in their Vegas act. Even JFK was saying the code word. I should have copyrighted it.”
Natalie became a regular at Sinatra’s that May and June, according to Hyatt, who saw her at studio school every day, keeping her secret. “I remember one Friday Natalie just couldn’t wait to get out of there. She kept looking at her watch, dancing up and down, saying, ‘I have to get to the hairdresser and look really beautiful tonight because — don’t tell anybody— I’m going back to Frank Sinatra’s house. They’re having a party and I can’t wait to get up there.’ It was a big deal to her. Everybody was up there— Dean Martin, the Rat Pack, all the big stars, all way older than her. She was probably the only person under thirty there except for maybe some of the dancing girls from Las Vegas. I guarantee you she was the only fifteen-year-old there.”