Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

He’d called her a time or two in 1956, and she claims to have visited him when they were playing the same cities in the South. Now she became a sexual mentor for him as well—he might have been with a lot of girls, but he really had no technique as a lover.

  In some ways, their sex was clinical, and she sized him up in much the same way. (“He was not badly built. He wasn’t humongous, but he wasn’t tiny either. I would say that he was a little bit above average.”) He was always a considerate partner, always made sure she was satisfied. But in her experience, he kissed like a high school boy (“I told him most women don’t like to get their face that wet”), and he was timid in the art of cunnilingus.

  “He loved oral sex for himself. He wasn’t very aggressive for the female, but he would try it if I wanted. I always cleaned him before and after, took him in the shower, or I would bring a nice scented washcloth with perfumed soap and wash him off and towel-dry him, because I didn’t want anybody else’s residue. He once told me that I was one of the cleanest women he had ever been with.”

  After years of separating sex and love, having good girls at home and “whores,” as he said, on the road, Elvis now tried to combine the two. But he knew that Gladys would never really approve of her, and Tura knew he couldn’t be monogamous. (“You are only human and you are a man, and that thing rules everything guys do.”) She also believed that he couldn’t refuse women, that as a southern gentleman, he literally didn’t want to be discourteous to their advances. “He wanted to please, and he didn’t know how to be standoffish with women, because that was not how he was raised. He always treated all women like ladies.”

  But he seldom used protection when they made love, remembering the trauma of the early incident in Shreveport, and relied on early withdrawal as his form of birth control. Tura told him that had to stop.

  “I said, ‘If you are going to be with other girls, make sure you are well protected, because somebody is going to try to say that she’s gotten pregnant by you, and if you are not careful, she’ll make you marry her or ruin your career.” His mother had told him the same thing, he said. He’d be careful.

  The relationship, which was slight at best, lasted until he went into the army. But though the romance faded, the friendship remained. Sonny West, Red’s cousin, who would later join the entourage, remembers meeting her in the early 1960s. Mostly, Elvis would call Tura for advice with various women. “After we split and I was no longer his girlfriend,” she says, “I became his adopted mama.”

  Yet his fixation on burlesque stars—his female equivalent—continued. In October 1957, he went to Las Vegas for a ten-day vacation, staying at the Sahara Hotel. There he had a one-night stand with legendary exotic dancer Tempest Storm, eight years his senior. She later recounted it in a television interview.

  “He called me about three one morning. He wanted to come over. I told him to come in the back door, that I didn’t want the doorman seeing who I was entertaining. He crawled across a back fence, and in doing so, ripped his pants.”

  Storm excused herself to put on one of her sexiest negligees, and to lock her French poodle in another room. The pooch would become a problem.

  “All night, as Elvis and I were together, my little poodle barked and scratched at the door.”

  The last time she saw Elvis was about 1970. The first thing he asked her was, “Do you still have that damned little poodle?”

  Elvis appeared to everyone to be on top of the world—thriving record career, movies, women, and now a mansion for himself and his family. But underneath, the stress was getting to him. That March, in downtown Memphis, he was accused of pulling a gun on a nineteen-year-old marine, who claimed that Elvis had intentionally bumped into his wife. It turned out to be a Hollywood prop gun, and Elvis insisted he hadn’t really meant any harm. Still, he sent the marine, Private Hershel Nixon, a rambling six-page telegram that offered both an apology and a window into his psychological state: “Many times there have been people who came up to me and stick [sic] out their hands to shake hands with me, and they hit me . . . and then take off for no reason at all. . . . So when you called me over the other night . . . I didn’t know what you were going to do.”

  The following month, on April 19, Elvis imported another Hollywood starlet to Memphis, this time for Easter weekend. Her name was Yvonne Lime. A California native, the wholesome blond had an uncredited role in Loving You, but a costarring role as Michael Landon’s girlfriend in I Was a Teenage Werewolf.

  Elvis had seen her in The Rainmaker. Since he’d read portions of the script for his screen test, he studied the picture intently on its release. When Yvonne came on the Loving You set, playing a small part in which she talked to a group of teenagers, he stayed to watch her do her scene. It made her nervous, but not as much as when he came over afterward and asked for her phone number. The next day, he introduced her to his parents, who were still visiting, and to his friend Judy Spreckels. Then after he came home to Memphis, he started calling her, saying, “Honey, I miss you so much. Please leave Hollywood and come.”

  They stopped first on Audubon Drive (where Yvonne’s picture now replaced Kay Wheeler’s in his bedroom), and then he gave her a quick tour of town on his motorcycle. At the end, he rode her out to Graceland, which was still being renovated. They posed for a newspaper photographer, Bob Williams, in front of the stately columns, but Yvonne had on a striped outfit that looked more like California lounge pajamas than Tennessee street wear, so the pictures telegraphed publicity, not passion. Then they went home. A couple of Elvis’s buddies were there, including Gene, who acted goofy, carrying around a doorknob and a sandwich and a pair of pliers in a briefcase. For dinner, the Presleys’ new black maid, Alberta, served them all meat loaf and mashed potatoes, Elvis’s favorite comfort food.

  After dinner, they sat out on the front walk in lawn chairs, and Elvis took Yvonne’s hand. Then he picked up his mother’s. “My two best girls,” he said. He might as well have declared, “My past, and my future,” except that Elvis could never really let go of Gladys. He could share himself with someone, and he needed that third person to mend the ancient circle, broken long ago in Tupelo. But he could never let there be just two. It reminded Yvonne of their first date in Hollywood, when they’d gone to see James Dean’s last movie, Giant, Elvis sitting between Gladys and Yvonne, holding his mother’s hand with his right, and Yvonne’s with his left.

  “Are you going to be my little girl?” he asked once Gladys had gone inside.

  “Yes, darling,” she answered. But even then she realized it wouldn’t happen. “I knew from what Elvis told me that he couldn’t think of marriage for a long, long time. And I was just beginning to get the picture breaks I’d worked for since I was a child.” Most of all, life in Memphis was just too different from the way she’d grown up in Glendale.

  That Saturday, Elvis took her to an all-night party at Sam Phillips’s house. She could tell Elvis hadn’t been feeling well—he had a skin infection on his shoulder, he told her, that had been bothering him for some time. “Even with all the noise and laugher, I could see Elvis was feeling worse by the minute. He was unusually quiet, and his eyes began to get a sick look.” He excused himself to talk with Sam about it.

  “Elvis came out with a rash just above his pubic hair,” as Sam remembered it. “It was just what we call a nice, big ol’ risen. The doctor will call it a carbuncle. He hadn’t told anybody, and he ran around with that damn thing festering up for two months. We went into the living room, and he showed me. He said, ‘What can I do? You don’t think I’ve got syphilis, do you?’

  “It didn’t look like it, but he was white as a sheet. I called Dr. Henry Moskowitz, my doctor, and I said, ‘Henry, Elvis is over here, and he’s got a big ol’ risen on his stomach. Could you come and take a look at it?’ And he said no, but he called down to Baptist [Memorial Hospital], and he said, ‘You all run down there, and they’ll take a look at it and let me know what they see.’

  “We went down to Baptist abou
t seven o’clock. When we first went in, there were three or four nurses there. I don’t know what those sick folks did, because before we left, there were fifty nurses down there from every floor.

  “Anyway, this thing was so red that when they lanced it, it shot two feet in the air. And you know how much pain he had to have been in for so long, but he was scared to find out what it really was. He hardly said a word on the way down there, and it was about a ten-mile trip. But on the way back, we couldn’t shut him up, he was so happy.”

  When they got back to the house, Elvis told Yvonne they’d given him some penicillin to help clear the infection, and he was feeling well enough to stay at the party. But by 2 A.M., he’d lapsed into a somber mood, and began singing hymns and spirituals. It was raining by then, and Sam put some wood in the fireplace to cut the chill. It thrilled Yvonne to hear that famous voice in the darkened room, with just the light from the fireplace, and she saw he had more passion for religious music than any other.

  By daybreak, everybody was out by the swimming pool, laughing again and eating breakfast. Yvonne cooked Elvis’s eggs for him—hard as a rock, the way he liked them.

  On Easter night, Elvis, with Yvonne and the entourage, went to services at the First Assembly of God. It was the first time he had been to church in a long time, and he felt both awkward and relieved. He passed a note to one of the ushers for Reverend Hamill, asking if the pastor would see him in his office afterward.

  He was sitting, waiting, when Reverend Hamill walked in. Elvis quickly rose. As the clergyman remembered, “He said, ‘Pastor, I am the most miserable young man you’ve ever seen. I’m doing the things you taught me not to, and I’m not doing the things you said I should.’ He cried and asked me to pray for him.”

  For more than an hour, the two prayed together, and Elvis continued to weep, asking the minister to forgive him for his sins. “He didn’t say what they were, and I didn’t know what they were.” But clearly Elvis “was constantly in conflict with what he wanted to do and what he was doing.” Reverend Hamill told him to call the next day, and he would give him the address of a pastor friend in Hollywood, M. O. Balliet. Elvis phoned Reverend Hamill’s secretary on Tuesday morning, but he never followed through with the contact.

  The last time Kay Wheeler saw him, at the press premiere for Jailhouse Rock, she, too, could tell that Elvis was not himself. “The change had set him. He seemed lonely and isolated, not the ‘Memphis Flash’ of the Texas tours of 1956. He walked in the room of probably a hundred reporters, and yelled loudly at me across the room, ‘Is that you, Kay?’ Everybody turned to look at me, and I answered, ‘Yes, Elvis, it’s me.’ Those were our last spoken words. But he remembered me. I was the one who got away.”

  The plot of Jailhouse Rock, in which Elvis’s character, Vince Everett, goes to prison for accidentally killing a man in a barroom fight, drew on two aspects of Elvis’s life—his father’s time at Parchman, and his own fears of violence at the hands of others, as Elvis alluded to so fervently in his telegram to Private Nixon. The story (by Nedrick Young, who won an Academy Award for The Defiant Ones) follows Vince as he learns the guitar from a fellow prisoner (Mickey Shaughnessy), and becomes a hot new singing star with the help of record promoter Peggy van Alden, played by Judy Tyler.

  Jailhouse Rock, shot in black and white, is memorable as the movie in which Elvis first hints at his abilities as a serous dramatic actor. It also contains two scenes that would rank among the most unforgettable of his film career—the iconic, cell block production number (“Jailhouse Rock”), which choreographer Alex Romeo created from Elvis’s natural stage movements, and his cocky love scene with Judy Tyler, which mirrored his brash behavior in his early days at the Louisiana Hayride. When Vince impulsively grabs the tough but provocative Peggy to kiss her—a serious piece of manhandling—she pushes him away. “How dare you think such cheap tactics work with me,” she admonishes. “Them ain’t tactics, honey,” he drawls. “That’s just the beast in me.”

  “The beast” emerges in another famous image connected with Jailhouse Rock, a publicity photograph of Elvis in a nightclub scene with a blond striptease dancer. In it, he sits at a bar in the background, gazing up at the stripper onstage, his image framed between her legs in the foreground.

  “They spent almost all day lining up the shot, shooting it, reshooting it, and changing the marks,” remembers the dancer, Gloria Pall. “He watched me so intensely every single moment of that scene. He never took his eyes off me. Even when we took a break he kept watching me. I did a whole dance for him with bumps and grinds, and I told him, ‘This reminds me of what you do.’ ”

  When Gloria first arrived on the set, Elvis thought she looked familiar. Then it hit him: She was the former showgirl whose fingers he’d sucked backstage in Vegas. He walked over to her for a playful reunion.

  “What are you doing here—are you an extra?” Gloria teased.

  “I’m the star of the movie,” he said.

  “You are? You flopped in Vegas and they made you a star?”

  He liked her cool banter and invited her up to the Beverly Wilshire for a party later that night. He had Suite 850, the Presidential Suite, he told her. It was four thousand square feet of opulence, one whole wing of the hotel—four bedrooms, a living room with a fireplace, dining room, den, kitchen, library, and a butler’s pantry. “I’d love to,” she said, “but can I bring my husband?”

  It took him aback.

  “When did you get married?”

  “About a month ago.”

  “Gee,” he said. “I don’t mess with married women.”

  “Well, I’m sorry about that,” she told him. “I don’t mess around either.”

  That was the end of that. “But he invited me to lunch, and he held my hand all the way. He was very sweet and boyish.”

  One night, Byron Raphael, the William Morris agent-in-training, took his new wife, Carolyn, to one of Elvis’s parties at the hotel. She was hoping to become an actress, and Byron could tell that Elvis found her attractive. The next day, when Elvis and Byron were sitting in his MGM dressing room, the star said, “Your wife sure is a sweet one, Byron. That’s the kind of girl I’ve been looking for. There must be hundreds of girls outside the gate. Why don’t you see if you can find me another Carolyn? In fact, take care of business for me.”

  From then on, Byron began supplying him with young girls, particularly his ideal type, a five-foot-four brunette with pretty eyes and a round behind. “To him, that was the most sensual part of a woman’s body.”

  As Elvis’s pimp, Byron would make one bad choice in two years—on the road, after a concert, he procured a luscious girl who stood five foot ten. He guided her into Elvis’s room without warning him that she wasn’t his usual cup of tea. Later that night, Elvis came out in his bathrobe and barked, “There were ten thousand girls out there, and you picked the only one on stilts! Don’t send any more Amazons in here!”

  Though Elvis described his sexual appetites as voracious—he’d say, “I like it hot and heavy, Byron the Siren, hot and heavy”—Byron was surprised to find that Elvis was far more interested in heavy petting than doing the wild thing, especially with young virgins. One evening, he brought three young girls into Elvis’s bedroom. Soon they were all naked, but Elvis stayed in his underwear, kissing and fondling them, and eventually falling asleep with them in his arms, his own records playing softly in the background.

  “He would never put himself inside one of these girls. Within minutes, he’d be asleep, and often the girl would still be rubbing herself against him. I’d step in and say, ‘It’s time to go now, honey. Elvis needs to sleep.’”

  Girls would come out in tears, crying that Elvis had told them to wait until their wedding night. Or they’d get hysterical and whine that Elvis didn’t love them. Byron learned damage control on the job.

  “I’d say, ‘No, that’s not true. He just wants to make sure you don’t have a baby. He’ll call you again.’ Of course, he almost n
ever did. But with some of the younger ones, he’d be like the tooth fairy, slipping hundred-dollar bills in their schoolbooks.”

  In May, Lamar Fike read in the paper that Elvis had aspirated a cap from one of his front teeth while sliding down the pole in the film’s big production number, and that he was recuperating from surgery to remove it from his lung. For several months, Fike had been living in Texas and working as a deejay. His career was short-lived—he couldn’t coordinate the turntables, check the Teletype machine, read the barometer, and get the commercials in order at the same time. “One day I just put an LP on, locked the doors, and got in the car. I heard the record going chick, chick, chick on my way out of town. That was my way of signing off.”

  Now Lamar picked up the phone and called Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles. He asked for Elvis’s room, and the operator patched him through. Elvis answered the phone himself.

  “I told him about my little exit from the radio station, and he laughed and said, ‘What are you going to do?’ I said I didn’t know, and he said, ‘Get your ass out here.’ ” Fueled on uppers, Lamar climbed in his new two-door 1956 Bel-Air Chevy and drove thirty-six hours straight on Route 66 to Los Angeles. From then on, he was an official part of Elvis’s entourage, and within a day, Elvis would get him work as an extra, along with Gene, Cliff, Junior, and George.

  At the Beverly Wilshire, Lamar was surprised to see Natalie Wood, whom he had met in Memphis on Audubon Drive.

  “By now I knew that Natalie was a good person, but she wasn’t very sure of herself, and you never knew what she was going to do. One day, she got out on the window ledge at the hotel. She must have liked Elvis better than she did in Memphis, because she said she was going to commit suicide over him.

  “I came running in to Elvis, and I said, “She’s out on that thing! She’s going to jump!’ He said, ‘She won’t jump.’ I said, ‘I’m telling you, she’s going to do it!’ She crouched out there about half an hour—promising, swearing—she was going to jump. He finally talked her back in. He said, ‘Nat, come and sit down and quit being so dramatic.’ She came back in, and I just collapsed in a chair. But Elvis was real nonchalant. He said, ‘I told you she wouldn’t do it.’ ”