Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  Critics would point out that Elvis’s dance steps during the three remaining songs, “We’re Gonna Move,” “Let Me,” and “Poor Boy,” were totally wrong for the period and made the scenes seem out of place. But Elvis fans didn’t care—they wanted to see him move. The title track became an instant hit, the single lodging in the number one spot for five weeks in November and December 1956, and the accompanying EP reaching number thirty-five. The Colonel was happy, and Weisbart was, too: The film made back its $1 million budget within three days.

  Elvis was proud to do the title song because it showed a side of him that had all but disappeared. “People think all I can do is belt,” Elvis told reporter Army Archerd, breaking into a sample of the song. “I used to sing nothing but ballads before I went professional. I love ballads.” But he was ticked about not being able to use Scotty and Bill on the record, though they appeared with him on The Ed Sullivan Show on September 9. Sullivan had been injured in a car accident in August, and so actor Charles Laughton filled in for him in New York. Still, it was an amazing opportunity for Elvis, especially since Sullivan had publicly vowed he’d never have such a vulgar personality on his program, all the while negotiating with the Colonel, even calling him backstage at The Steve Allen Show and shattering the industry price ceiling to get him.

  Since the performance came smack in the middle of filming Love Me Tender, Elvis was allowed to appear live from the CBS Studios in Los Angeles. More than 80 percent of the national audience watched him sing “Love Me Tender,” “Ready Teddy,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” and two verses of “Hound Dog.”

  Among them was eleven-year-old Priscilla Ann Beaulieu, of Austin, Texas, whose stepfather, Paul, a career Air Force officer, had bought her Elvis’s debut album at the PX. “I thought it might be something [she] would like . . . it seemed like music for her generation.” But once he and his wife, Ann, heard the music, they didn’t have such a high opinion. “Frankly, we forbade her to watch the show,” he remembers. But forbidden fruit is that much sweeter, Priscilla would later say. “I cracked open my door just enough to see the television set.”

  So many extraordinary things were happening for Elvis that he sometimes seemed oblivious to his old way of life. He was having a blast, being a movie star, meeting beautiful women, staying up all hours, and doing and saying whatever he wanted. Nothing inhibited him, or if it did, he didn’t act like it. In fact, fame emboldened him. He could be both playful and arrogant and get away with it, even with steely female reporters. Or at least he thought he could. When a young New York journalist came to visit him during the filming, he flirted with her shamelessly.

  “A press agent came by to tell me I had had enough time with Elvis,” she wrote. “I started to leave and Elvis, who was still sprawled on the couch, darted out his hand and caught my foot. ‘Maybe she’s shy; maybe she’d like to be alone with me,’ he said. The press agent shrugged and left.

  “I asked Elvis to take his hand off my foot. ‘Okay,’ he said, looking up under heavy lids. ‘Ah’m just spoofing you.’ I asked Elvis how he felt about girls who threw themselves at him. Again the heavy-lidded look. ‘Ah usually take them,’ he said, watching my face for the shock value of his words. He grinned. ‘Hell,’ he said, ‘you know, Ah’m kind of having fun with you because you’re so smart.’ ”

  Colonel Parker had used William Morris to broker Elvis’s movie deals, building on his relationship with Abe Lastfogel, the diminutive head of the respected talent agency, from his Eddy Arnold days. Lastfogel had assigned Leonard Hirshan directly to Elvis, since as Hirshan puts it, “The three of us negotiated the [Love Me Tender] deal with Fox, so I considered that my deal as well as anybody’s.” But though Elvis was Morris’s client, and not Parker, the Colonel never let the agency deal directly with his star, insisting that everything go through him. Parker particularly didn’t trust Hirshan, fearing that he would make himself too powerful with Elvis and get in the Colonel’s way. Parker all but banned Hirshan from Presley’s movie sets and then went about finding a mole within the agency to report on their plans.

  Byron Raphael was a twenty-two-year-old agent-in-training at the Morris Agency in Beverly Hills in 1956, working his way up in the mailroom. One day, he delivered an envelope to Elvis’s outsized manager on the Fox lot. The Colonel sized up the small, affable young man and immediately appropriated him (“Tell your bosses you’re going to work for me”), and made Raphael his spy—both within the Morris office and inside Elvis’s camp. Since Raphael was only a year older than Elvis, and obsessed with music, it was an easy alliance.

  On September 10, midway through the shooting, Nick Adams—also believed to be a sentry for the Colonel, reporting on Elvis’s comings and goings—arranged for eighteen-year-old Natalie Wood to visit Elvis on the set. Elvis, who had gotten so caught up in her Oscar-nominated performance in Rebel Without a Cause, tittered like a schoolboy at the thought of meeting her. Natalie, attracted to bad-boy types and dark personalities, was just as intrigued with him.

  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 a songwriting career, starting with Ricky Nelson’s first number one, “Poor Little Fool.” But the thrill of being around Elvis never diminished, at least not for Mary Jo. “Just walking into the room, he had that presence that he had onstage. He was gorgeous, kind, [and had a] great sense of humor.” The visits continued for years. In 1957, “He used to put me on his lap and sing ‘Young and Beautiful’ to me,” Mary Jo remembers, “which not many people can say.”

  When Natalie Wood arrived at the Beverly Wilshire about nine o’clock on the night of September 10, she found more than a dozen people in the living room, ranging from Elvis’s cousins and their dates to the young girls he’d invited up from the fan huddle downstairs. Elvis had just gotten out of the shower after heavy petting with one of the more willing fans, and he was wearing a white smoking jacket with the letters E.P. embroidered in gold. He immediately gave Natalie a hug and asked if she’d like to see some of the dailies from the film. She said yes, recognizing the code, and they disappeared into the bedroom.

  Twenty minutes later, Byron was surprised to see a furious Natalie storm out the door. “What’s the matter with your boss?” she demanded, glaring at him. “Doesn’t he know how to screw? He’s all hands and no action.” Byron fumbled for excuses, but Natalie kept raving. “I thought he was supposed to be the king of the sack! But he doesn’t want to screw me!”

  Elvis’s guests began to scramble, leaving only Gene sitting there as Natalie continued her rant. “What’s Elvis going to do, tell his buddies I’m not sexy enough for him?” Byron assured her Elvis wouldn’t do any such thing. Natalie glanced back at Gene with a smirk on her face and taunted him. “I think all you guys are homos,” she said.

  Then, to Byron’s amazement, the Hollywood star propositioned the agent-in-training, and he took her up on it. Suddenly, he was on top of her, frantically pulling off her pedal pushers as she worked to remove his pants. She guided him into her, and he pumped fast and furiously, and she did, too. In seconds, they were both glistening with sweat. But she criticized his performance, and he worried that he hadn’t used a rubber. Natalie pushed him out of her and quickly dressed.

  “You’re okay,” she said matter-of-factly. “But tell Elvis if he wants to go out with me again, I want to go all the way. You can also tell him I’m the best fuck in town.” And then she left. Byron glanced over at the bedroom and saw Elvis standing in the doorway. He didn’t know how much he’d witnessed, but the singer simply closed the door and never mentioned it. Later, Elvis made a crude remark to the guys about Natalie’s feminine odor—and began exhibiting more tendencies toward voyeurism.

  A sexpot like Natalie naturally would have intimidated a man as sexually immature as Elvis, but there was another reason he had not had intercourse with her. Aside from his deep romance with June Juanico and his serious relationship with Barbara Hearn (he was also getting cozy with a female wrestler, Penny Banner), he had fallen hard for Debra Paget, his physical ideal. “She’s the most beautiful girl in the world,” he told Photoplay magazine.

  Many accounts of his infatuation with Debra hold that he couldn’t get to first base with her, that she found him the “moron” she alluded to in print, and that his love was unrequited. But in truth, they both fell in love.

  Debra, reserved and quiet, found him sweet, kind, and funny. And Elvis was entranced with more than just her perfect cheekbones and fragile beauty. She had two more qualities he admired—she was religious, from a Jewish background, and a virgin. Because Gladys told him to end up with a girl who was pure and untested, “He always said he’d marry a virgin,” Debra remembered.

  But like Elvis, Debra had a strong, unbreakable bond with her mother, Marguerite Gibson, who was also heavyset and redoubtable like Gladys. The similarities were obvious to both Elvis and Debra, and Elvis even saw a facial resemblance between Debra and the youthful Gladys. To Elvis, who was looking for a virgin who embodied both his mother and his physical twin, Debra became a prize beyond all imagining.

  He talked to Gladys about her all the time, going on and on, and she could see he was overwhelmed with her, calling her “Debbie” with a smile in his voice. When a reporter asked if he had a favorite female star, he said, “I love ’em all, but I’ve got one special gal—and she’s the only gal for me. But she keeps me 64,000 miles away!” And who was that? “Debbie!” Elvis blurted.

  But there was a larger problem, aside from the fact that Elvis had already publicly declared that he had two girlfriends, Barbara Hearn and June Juanico. Debra’s brassy mother, who managed her daughter’s career and had been in the theater—some said burlesque, inspiring Debra’s routine on The Milton Berle Show—wanted her to have nothing to do with him. Elvis couldn’t figure it out. His conversations with Debra, both on the set and at her house in Beverly Hills, where he sometimes played with the pet chimpanzee (he’d later get one himself), revolved largely around the topic of God. Yet her father, likewise, found Elvis not up to Debra’s standards.

  “There were stories going around about him,” the actress told Suzanne Finstad, and her mother, fearing the worst, would not let Debra leave the house unchaperoned. Try as he might, Elvis could not convince Debra’s parents that he was not the hell-raising hooligan that some of the press made him out to be. As with so many of Elvis’s younger love interests, Debra had never been on an actual date, which made her even that more irresistible to him. But because of her parents’ virulent reaction, Debra dared not let Elvis know for certain that she returned his affections. “I was very shy then,” she continued to Finstad. “I hardly talked . . . I’m not sure I ever told him how I felt, but he could feel it.”

  Elvis could, indeed, feel it, but he didn’t know what to think: Talk had it that Debra was seeing Howard Hughes at the same time, and from the cars that came and went at Debra’s house, Elvis believed it was true.

  A week after the disastrous episode with Natalie Wood at the Beverly Wilshire, Nick Adams took Elvis out to a hotel in Malibu, where Natalie was enjoying a getaway with her bisexual boyfriend, actor Scott Marlowe. Natalie and Scott had spent the time talking, as they had before, about marrying. But both Warner Brothers, where Natalie was under contract, and her mother, Maria, strictly opposed the idea and forced them to break up. Now Elvis, Natalie, and Nick, also rumored to be bisexual, were “almost a threesome, having a lot of fun together,” Natalie told newspaper columnist Louella Parsons. They were seen that week at the Iris in Hollywood, watching the trashy B movies Hot Rod Girls and Girls in Prison.

  Tab Hunter remembers how taken she was with him. “Natalie and I were in New York doing The Perry Como Show, and we were walking back to her hotel. She was staying at the Essex House, and . . . she was going on and on about Elvis, and I was getting a little annoyed and a little jealous here.

  “The hotel sign spelled out E-S-S-E-X H-O-U-S-E all over Broadway, but the lights were out of the first two letters, making it read S-E-X H-O-U-S-E.

  “I said, ‘Don’t tell me he’s going to come and visit you at the SEX HOUSE!’ And she took her purse and went wham!, and just hauled off and belted me. Natalie was crazy about him.”

  But deep down, Natalie also found Elvis desperately lonely, a lot like herself, even as so much about him mystified her. He acted more like a concerned older brother around her than anything else, and as she told Presley biographer Albert Goldman, he was a little too con
ventional, almost square.

  “He was the first person of my age group I had ever met who said to me, ‘How come you’re wearing makeup? Why do you want to go to New York? Why do you want to be on your own? Why don’t you want to stay home and be a sweet little girl? It’s nice to stay home.’ We’d go to P.C. Brown’s and have a hot fudge sundae. We’d go to Hamburger Hamlet and have a burger and a Coke. He didn’t drink. He didn’t swear. He didn’t even smoke! It was like having the date that I never ever had in high school. I thought it was really wild!”

  Natalie’s mother encouraged the relationship, even as Natalie herself was still dissatisfied with him in bed. Elvis didn’t feel it was any big romance and continued to see as many women as he wanted. Around the same time, he and Nick spent a Sunday afternoon with Judy Spreckels, and later, the trio went horseback riding at Judy’s ranch. Among her many pictures of Elvis is a photograph that freeze-frames the day. “He was laughing. It was just such a fun time.” She and Elvis loved each other, all right. “But it was just a really terrific friendship.”

  Still, no matter what Elvis was doing with anyone else, Natalie was thinking about him. As proof, she had her seamstress make two big, blousy velvet shirts for him, one in romance red and another in heartbreak blue.

  The shirts would become iconic as the ones Elvis wore on September 26, 1956, at his homecoming appearances at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show, the blue for the afternoon performance, and the red for the evening. However, the blue one almost didn’t make it to Tupelo.

  Barbara Hearn was Elvis’s date, and early that morning on Audubon Drive, where the Presleys were having remodeling work done, “Elvis handed me something on a clothes hanger with a laundry cover on it. He said, ‘Hold this.’ There was a bit of confusion, and lots of people around, and I stood there holding it until I thought, ‘Gosh, I’m not a closet rod here,’ and I laid it on the sofa.”