Baby, Let's Play House Read online

  Baby, Let’s Play House

  ELVIS

  PRESLEY

  and the

  WOMEN

  WHO LOVED HIM

  Alanna NASH

  For Rockin’ Robin Rosaaen,

  Queen of all Elvisness, TCB

  The world is so full of a number

  of things.

  I’m sure we should all

  be as happy as kings.

  —Robert Louis Stevenson

  “Happy Thought,” from A Child’s Garden of Verses

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Chapter One - “My Best Gal”

  Chapter Two - An Ideal Guy

  Chapter Three - Blue Heartache

  Chapter Four - Dixie’s Delight

  Chapter Five - “You Need to Be Kissed”

  Chapter Six - “A Great, Big, Beautiful Hunk of Forbidden Fruit”

  Chapter Seven - Biloxi Bliss

  Chapter Eight - “An Earthquake in Progress”

  Chapter Nine - Love Times Three

  Chapter Ten - Hillbillies in Hollywood

  Chapter Eleven - Showgirls and Shavers

  Chapter Twelve - Twin Surprises

  Chapter Thirteen - “The Most Miserable Young Man”

  Chapter Fourteen - Nipper Dreams

  Chapter Fifteen - Private Presley

  Chapter Sixteen - “Wake up, Mama, Wake up”

  Chapter Seventeen - Fräulein Fallout

  Chapter Eighteen - House Full of Trouble

  Chapter Nineteen - Priscilla

  Chapter Twenty - “Crazy”

  Chapter Twenty-One - Going Under

  Chapter Twenty-Two - “A Little Happiness”

  Chapter Twenty-Three - Nungin, Thumper, and Bug

  Chapter Twenty-Four - Satyrs and Spirits

  Photo Insert

  Chapter Twenty-Five - “You Don’t Really Love Me!”

  Chapter Twenty-Six - Hitched!

  Chapter Twenty-Seven - A Baby, a Babe, and Black Leather

  Chapter Twenty-Eight - Sin City

  Chapter Twenty-Nine - Girls, Guns, and the President

  Chapter Thirty - “A Prince from Another Planet ”

  Chapter Thirty-One - Buntin’

  Chapter Thirty-Two - “Where Does Love Go? ”

  Chapter Thirty-Three - Flickering White Light

  Chapter Thirty-Four - Breathe!

  Epilogue

  Endnotes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Alanna Nash

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  No matter if he were young and thin, a vision in gold lamé, or middle-aged and paunchy, stretching the physical limits of his gabardine jumpsuit, Elvis Presley never failed to affect his female audiences the same way: He drove them crazy. The mere sight and sound of him made women around the world drop all inhibitions, and to publicly behave as they never would otherwise, giving in to screams, fainting, and wild exhibitions of frenzy.

  Sometime during the 1970s, when Elvis was a Las Vegas staple, Jean Beaulne, who had started his entertainment career in the 1960s as one-third of Les Baronets, Montreal’s answer to the Beatles, was flabbergasted to see the reaction of one woman who attended Elvis’s dinner show at the Las Vegas Hilton.

  In between songs, some twenty-five minutes into the performance, as Elvis shook hands and kissed the women who crowded up near the stage and hoped to receive one of the multitude of scarves he ceremoniously dispensed, “We heard a woman yelling in the back of the room, and then we turned to see her hopping from one tabletop to the other to get up to Elvis.

  “He was so surprised! He made a face, like, ‘Wow, what happened?’ Everybody in the room was laughing. Then she put her arms around his neck and kissed him. He smiled and gave her a scarf, and then she turned around and did the same thing, jumping from one table to the other. Everybody started to applaud.”

  Yet Elvis was never more potent than at the beginning of his career, before the patently routine scarf offering, when he was dangerous, revolutionary, and nobody knew what to expect.

  On November 23, 1956, two days after the nationwide release of Love Me Tender, Elvis’s first film, a high school photographer named Lew Allen covered a Presley concert in Cleveland and was astonished at what he saw.

  “There was a row of policemen standing in front of the stage, and girls would start at the back of the auditorium with their eyes on Elvis, and run as fast as they could [toward the stage]. They’d bounce off these policemen’s stomachs, and then bounce back four or five feet and land on their rear ends. And they would still have their eyes on Elvis. It was amazing. They did it repeatedly, like flies running into a light bulb.”

  Allen may have been dumbfounded, but as blues songwriter Willie Dixon teased, “The men don’t know/But the little girls understand.”

  “Nineteen fifty-six was a great year,” remembers Presley’s seminal guitarist, Scotty Moore. “The crowds had gotten very large, and it would get so loud that it would just cancel out all the sound onstage. The best way I can describe it is like when you dive into the water and you hear the phasing, the rush of the water. Actually, on most songs, if we couldn’t hear him, we’d know where he was at by his body language. We were the only band I know literally directed by an ass.”

  As Elvis worked out his own private fantasies onstage, an entire nation would take his directive, even if it was initially slow to accept it.

  “Elvis’s sexual history,” the rock critic Robert Christgau has written, “inflects the myth of a feral young Southerner whose twitching hips were the point of articulation for a seismic shift in American mores.”

  The exact moment of that shift, according to some Elvisologists, arrived on June 5, 1956, when the twenty-one-year-old Presley appeared on The Milton Berle Show. It was not Presley’s television debut. But in his previous network appearances, when his guitar had largely restricted his movements, Elvis relied more on “attitude, sinking eyelids, a curled lip, sideburns, and a husky voice that rose from somewhere below the waist,” as newsman Peter Jennings later put it, to convey his libidinous intent. Now on the Berle show, performing a lascivious rendition of “Hound Dog,” he moved in a way that was completely unfathomable for a white boy of the 1950s, punctuating a drawn-out, half-time ending with the burlesque bumps and grinds of a female stripper. At one point in the flurry of sexual shakes and shimmies, he seemed to hump the microphone, and in a futuristic salute to his would-be son-in-law, Michael Jackson, almost grab his crotch.

  The following day, newspapers across the nation bellowed their outrage at this obscene purveyor of the fledgling art form called rock and roll, Ben Gross of the New York Daily News decrying that popular music had “reached its lowest depths in the ‘grunt and groin’ antics of one Elvis Presley.”

  Forty years later, in his book, Elvis After Elvis: The Posthumous Career of a Living Legend, Gilbert B. Rodman, an assistant professor of communications at the University of South Florida, would label Elvis’s performance on the Berle show “a message so shocking that it seemed that Western civilization could not possibly survive its utterance,” and call it the moment when rock and roll was “recognized as a threat to mainstream U.S. culture.”

  Such intellectual hand-wringing brings to mind the old black-and-white film clips of grim-faced men warning of the dangers of rock and roll, urging decent, God-fearing Americans to smash any copies of the Devil music they could find, lest the nation’s youth be corrupted and damned to hell.

  Yet despite on which side of the moral fence one
sits, there is no arguing that if Frank Sinatra was the first popular singer to make women swoon with the thoughts of romantic love, Elvis moved those obsessions lower, to erotic regions no mainstream performer had dared acknowledge with such ferocious abandon.

  Today, Elvis’s movements seem tame to younger generations raised on incendiary films and videos. But “few rock and rollers of any era have moved with such salacious insouciance,” writes Christgau. In 1956, the cantilevered poetry of Elvis’s swiveling midsection, coupled with the eye-popping sight of his left leg working like a jackhammer, quickly led journalist Pinckney Keel of the Jackson [Mississippi] Clarion-Ledger to dub him “Elvis the Pelvis,” a term Elvis despised, calling it, “One of the most childish expressions I’ve ever heard coming from an adult.”

  That same year, on August 6, 1956, Tampa journalist Paul Wilder, a crony of Elvis’s nefarious manager, Colonel Tom Parker, conducted one of the few, and most famous, interviews with Elvis for TV Guide. Backstage before the show in Lakeland, Florida, Wilder got Elvis’s dander up when he read him a review from the Miami Herald that criticized both his voice and his guitar playing. “What remains, unfortunately,” the article concluded, “are his pelvic gyrations. And that’s the core of the whole appeal—sex stimulation.”

  “Any answer to that one?” Wilder asked.

  “Well, I don’t roll my—what’d he call it—pelvic gyrations,” an indignant Elvis replied. “My pelvis had nothin’ to do with what I do. I just get kinda in rhythm with the music. I jump around to it because I enjoy what I’m doin’. I’m not tryin’ to be vulgar, I’m not tryin’ to sell any sex, I’m not tryin’ to look vulgar and nasty. I just enjoy what I’m doin’ and tryin’ to make the best of it.”

  It was a fib, of course. Even then, he knew the power he had onstage and off, the way he could “charm the pants off a snake,” in novelist Bobbie Ann Mason’s Southern expression.

  She touched my hand, what a chill I got

  Her lips are like a volcano that’s hot

  I’m proud to say she’s my buttercup

  I’m in love

  I’m all shook up

  Mm, mm oh, oh, yeah, yeah!

  For a man who was literally pawed, groped, scratched, and had his clothes ripped away by women for his entire twenty-three-year career, Presley demonstrated a remarkable tolerance for his audience. He rarely seemed to resent their overexuberant physical presence, their endless requests for autographs, or worse, the way their desire to possess him kept him a virtual prisoner in hotel rooms and at home in his beloved Graceland. In that regard, he stands almost alone in the pantheon of great rock stars, many of whom despise the very people who made them.

  “He enjoyed the feel of being with fans,” remembers photographer Alfred Wertheimer, who gained unprecedented access to Presley in 1956 and captured some of the best-known images of young Elvis. “He loved being with girls. Later on, I found out whether the girls were eight years old or eighteen or sixty-five or seventy, he just liked women.”

  Hank Saperstein, the merchandiser who plastered Elvis’s likeness on everything from panties to record players to lipstick in Tutti Frutti Red and Hound Dog Orange in 1956, noticed that both women and men responded equally to Elvis’s sneer. “His sneer was all-important. It was a good-looking, lovable sneer.” But if both sexes inherently embraced the cruelty and playfulness in that curl of the lip, why did only women faint at Presley’s concerts?

  The word fan comes from fanatic, of course. But a more interesting focus is the origin of hysteria. A Greek medical term, hysterikos, it means dysfunctional or “wandering” uterus. Hippocrates coined the word, believing that madness overcame women who adhered to sexual abstinence, and that the uterus wandered upward, compressing the diaphragm, heart, and lungs.

  There’s poetry in the fact, then, that Elvis learned certain of his stage moves from women, one of the surprises of this book. And it suggests that part of his potency was not just his ability to translate precisely what turned women on, but to mimic their actions back to them.

  However, so much of what made Elvis Elvis sprang from his assimilation of black culture, both in his native Tupelo, Mississippi, and in his adopted hometown of Memphis.

  This was true both of his music—a greasy, intense union of white and black in its mix of country and blues and gospel and pop—and in the fur-trimmed flamboyance of his personal style. His “sexual savagery” onstage challenged the traditional view of white masculinity, particularly as he arrived on the national consciousness in the staid, button-gloved Eisenhower era, dominated by the bland orchestras of Mantovani, Hugo Winterhalter, and Percy Faith. Everything about him—from his exotic looks (hooded eyes giving way to an impossibly pomaded ducktail) to his sound (the haunting spookiness of “Heartbreak Hotel”)—suggested an alien inexplicably fallen to earth.

  “People wonder why everyone impersonates the old Elvis,” says Kevin Eggers, the founder of Tomato Records, who met Presley at a touch football game in Beverly Hills, California, as a teenager. “But if a young person could do the young Elvis, they’d be a superstar. That raw talent, that incredible creature came onstage and changed everything.”

  Including, to some degree, the perception of male beauty and the acceptance of androgyny, since Elvis crossed the sex barrier just as he had the race barrier. From the first, he wore eye shadow and mascara to accentuate his likeness to his mother, Gladys (and to emulate Rudolph Valentino, the silent screen star once accused of the “effeminization of the American male”). And by his early Las Vegas incarnation, Elvis personified the glam rock movement that was then burgeoning in the United Kingdom, blending the sex appeal of men and women in his choice of flowing stage wear.

  Perhaps not surprising, Elvis’s contemporary appeal does not stop with heterosexual women. Female Elvis impersonator Leigh Crow, aka Elvis Herselvis, who identifies as a drag king, predicts that Elvis will become a lesbian icon just as Marilyn Monroe is for gay men. “Like k.d. lang,” she says, “the whole image that she’s got . . . that’s where it came from.” And lang bears it out: “He was the total androgynous beauty. I would practice Elvis in front of the mirror when I was twelve or thirteen years old.”

  For so many reasons, then, “Elvis swims in our minds, and in the emotions, all through time,” offers film director David Lynch. “There’s the word icon, and I don’t think anybody has topped that . . . not one single person has ever topped Elvis.” Except financially. In 2006, Kurt Cobain bested him on the Forbes “Top-Earning Dead Celebrities” list, only to have Elvis take back his crown in 2007, the thirtieth-year anniversary of his death, hauling in $52 million. But in 2009, he slipped to fourth place, with $55 million, dwarfed by Yves Saint Laurent ($350 million), Rodgers and Hammerstein ($235 million), and Michael Jackson ($90 million). Still, $55 million is more than many of the music industry’s most popular living acts command. “For a dead man,” writes author Rodman, “Elvis Presley is awfully noisy.”

  In the spring of 2007, I received a call from an editor at Ladies’ Home Journal, who wanted an Elvis story for the August issue to mark the anniversary. But exactly what kind of article she didn’t know. Since it was a women’s magazine, I suggested what I thought was the obvious—an oral history of some of the women in Elvis’s life, both platonic and romantic, from girlfriends to family members to actresses to backup singers. I wanted to know how his status as one of the greatest sex symbols of the twentieth century informed his stage act and his interactions with the opposite sex.

  The resulting article, “The Women Who Loved Elvis,” was one of the best-read features in the magazine, and spawned a segment on The Early Show on CBS. Not long after, I was in Memphis, writing a story about Graceland for another publication. Staying in the Heartbreak Hotel across the street from the mansion’s sprawl, I stared at the photos on the wall of my suite. In each of them, Elvis held the luminous gaze of one of his Hollywood costars. I thought of the millions of women who had loved him from afar, the hundreds who had physically
known that embrace, and how he had died alone at home on the bathroom floor, a woman sleeping in his bed as the life ebbed out of him at the age of forty-two.

  How could Elvis Presley, one of the most romantic icons of his time, never have enjoyed a long-lasting, meaningful relationship with a woman?

  That was the question I pondered as the idea for this book took shape. It was particularly puzzling since, for all his maleness, Elvis was a very woman-centered man. It was women he could really talk with, and from whom he drew much of his strength.

  The answer, of course, is that it was simply easier for a man as complex as Elvis to have a relationship with the masses, who asked nothing of him and provided unconditional positive regard.

  “Bottom line,” says Kay Wheeler, who headed Presley’s first national fan club, “the most successful love affair was obviously between Elvis and his fans. And it has not died.”

  Elvis’s sexual history, that great Pandora’s box on which Christgau and Rodman lifted the lid, held fascinating surprises.

  —Alanna Nash

  Gladys and Elvis, circa 1946. In future photographs, as in this one, the two would almost always be touching. (Courtesy of David Troedson/Elvis Australia)

  Chapter One

  “My Best Gal”