Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  As filming began, Elvis had a date with Anne Neyland, who had a credited, but minor, role in the picture. But as on his first two films, where he’d set the precedent, he quickly turned his attention to his costar. Judy Tyler was a newlywed, having just married second husband Gregory LaFayette in March. Despite what the singer told Gloria Pall about not fooling around with married women, “she and Elvis had a thing going,” according to Lamar.

  At twenty-three, Judy Tyler (real name Judith Hess) was a tough cookie and a show business veteran with a pedigree—her father, Julian Hess, was well known as a trumpeter for Benny Goodman and Paul Whiteman, and her mother, Loreleo Kendler, danced with the Ziegfeld Follies. At sixteen, Judy had won a Miss Stardust beauty contest, which led to a job as a singer-chorine at the Copacabana nightclub. In 1951, when she auditioned for—and won—the part of Princess Summerfall Winterspring on The Howdy Doody Show children’s program, the irrepressibly sexy seventeen-year-old failed to mention that she was married, to twenty-six-year-old Colin Romoff, the Copa pianist and her vocal coach.

  She lasted two years as the grown-up puppet, but by then she had quite a reputation, drinking and stripping on nightclub tabletops. The consensus was that she was drop-dead beautiful, but she had a foul mouth, round heels with some of the cast and crew, and took no guff from anyone.

  In his book, Say Kids! What Time Is It? Stephen Davis, whose father, Howard Davis, was the show’s writer-director, recounts numerous stories of Judy’s wild behavior and numerous romantic liaisons. “She loved sex—she slept with everybody,” lamented Chief Thunderthud’s Bill Lecornec.

  Clarabell was especially shocked. “I would go out on weekend appearances with her,” said Bob Nicholson, “and while we got along fine, she would just as soon tell a store manager to go fuck himself as she would look at him. She had stars in her eyes and thought she was bigger than he was.”

  And she was. In 1956, she earned a Tony nomination for her performance in the play Pipe Dream, which landed her on the cover of Life magazine.

  Jailhouse Rock was Judy’s second film, and she appeared to be poised for a long career. But over the Fourth of July weekend, with filming just finished in mid-June, she and her husband were killed in a car crash near Billy the Kid, Wyoming. One story said she’d been cut in half.

  Elvis was devastated. “It really, really upset him,” says Lamar. “He broke down and cried, sitting up in the bathroom at Graceland.”

  “Nothing has hurt me as bad in my life,” Elvis told the newspapers. “I remember the last night I saw them. They were leaving on a trip. . . . All of us boys really loved that girl.”

  On July 4, Elvis, clearly distraught, showed up at George Klein’s house early in the morning. It was so awful about Judy. He’d just saved her from one serious accident, when she’d run into a door, putting her arm through the glass. He’d managed to grab it, keeping her from falling through.

  Then, changing the subject, Elvis mentioned he’d been watching this tiny blonde, Anita Wood, the replacement for Susie Bancroft on Wink Martindale’s WHBQ Top 10 Dance Party. George said he could get him an introduction.

  That was Thursday. On Monday night, Elvis had his first date with his next serious girlfriend.

  Elvis and Anita Wood embrace as she steps from a plane at Memphis Municipal Airport, September 13, 1957. She had been in Hollywood preparing for her first movie role. Elvis had given the nineteen-year-old a friendship ring the previous week. At some point, she would dye her hair black for him. (Robert Williams/the Commercial Appeal, courtesy David Troedson/Elvis Australia)

  Chapter Fourteen

  Nipper Dreams

  Anita Wood was nineteen years old, wore her hair in an appealing blond bob, and was in all ways a perfect southern sweetheart. She had grown up in Jackson, Tennessee, where she developed a spunky personality, as well as a soft, lilting accent that rolled the rs off the end of her words (“teen-agah”). It sounded cultured, though, so it didn’t get in the way of her deejay work. And Anita was not only pretty and pert, with dimples at the ready, but she was also talented and poised. She’d cultivated her singing voice and knew how to perform on camera. She also had a strict code of ethics, which Elvis was soon to learn.

  Instead of calling her himself for their first date, he’d asked Lamar to do it that Saturday, after her dance party show. Elvis wanted to see her that night.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I already have a date tonight.”

  Lamar couldn’t believe it. He went, as Anita remembers it, “ballistic.” But she’d given her word to Jimmy Omar for that night.

  “You mean you won’t break a date to go with Elvis Presley? Are you crazy?”

  No, she wasn’t crazy, but she also really wasn’t an Elvis fan, though as a disc jockey she played his records, and she’d grown up with Cliff Gleaves.

  “Well, I don’t believe Elvis would like that if I did that to him.”

  Anita thought she’d never hear from Elvis after that, but Lamar called again for Monday night, and this time she said yes.

  She wasn’t sure what she was getting into, though.

  She’d grown up innocent and sheltered with stern parents, and since they wouldn’t allow her to date, she’d never had a serious boyfriend. In the big city of Memphis, she rented a room from an older woman, Miss Patty, who clucked over her like a mother hen. When Elvis’s sleek black 1957 Cadillac limousine pulled up at the house, George Klein got out and walked to the door. “I’m here to pick up Anita,” he said. But Miss Patty pulled herself up in a self-righteous stance and refused him.

  “No, I’m sorry,” she said. “If Elvis wants to see Anita, he’ll have to come to the door and pick her up.”

  George went back to the car and explained the situation, and then the two of them came up the walk. Elvis had on his red velvet shirt, black trousers, and a black motorcycle cap, and for a moment, he stole Anita’s breath. “He was effervescent . . . absolutely the best-looking man I’ve ever seen, before or after.”

  The protective Miss Patty led Anita’s gentleman callers into the living room. There, she laid down the law. “Now, you have to have her back at a reasonable hour,” she said. Otherwise, Anita couldn’t go.

  Out in the car, Anita was surprised to find Lamar and Cliff, too, as she thought this was a date, the kind of thing where a boy and a girl go out together without other people. And where were they actually going? Elvis just seemed to be driving around. Then they pulled up by the Strand Theater, where Elvis showed her a giant cutout of himself as a display for Loving You, which was scheduled to premiere the following night.

  They drove around some more, stopping at a Krystal’s stand to get three dozen hamburgers. Anita didn’t like the little square steamed sandwiches, and she was amazed to watch the guys wolf down every one. After that, Elvis asked if she’d like to see Graceland.

  “I said, ‘Sure,’ you know. ‘I’d love to.’ I felt really at ease because of the guys in the backseat that I knew.”

  As soon as they got in the door, Elvis gave her a pink-and-black teddy bear from a large supply in a box in the dining room. His double-sided single “Teddy Bear/Loving You” had just sold 1.25 million copies in a week, and the Colonel had bought a gross of stuffed animals from a wholesale carnival house.

  It was a pleasant evening. Elvis introduced her to his parents and grandmother, and then gave her a tour of the lower floors. Then the group listened to some music, and Elvis played the piano. Finally, he said, “Come up. I want to show you my office.”

  There wasn’t much to see in his office, really, but it was right next to his bedroom, and he gently led her inside. She couldn’t believe how dark it was, with navy blue drapes. Then she saw his bed. It was ten by ten feet, and required specially made sheets, he told her. He had mirrors all around the room, too, and light blue mirrors in the bathroom that matched the baby blue carpet.

  They were just talking, finishing their tour, when Elvis began to sit her down and kiss her. She knew she was a sma
ll-town girl, but she was shocked—people didn’t kiss on the first date then. She didn’t care who he was. And she didn’t like it, especially when “his hands moved just a little bit where I didn’t think they should have been.”

  “I think I need to go home now,” she said. He didn’t put up a fuss.

  A couple of nights later, he invited her with his parents to see a private screening of Loving You, and then he came by one day in his old panel truck. He wanted to take her down to Lauderdale Courts to show her where he grew up, and then swing by Chenault’s drive-in for hamburgers. After that, he saw her almost every night, even if it was just to go back to Graceland to watch TV.

  Five days after that first date, Gladys invited Anita for dinner. She liked this girl, and she told Elvis not to let her get away. Elvis liked her, too. He talked baby talk with her (“I just ate that up. He treated you like you were a doll”), and because she stood only five foot three and weighed 110 pounds, Elvis affectionately called her “Little,” or “Li’l Bit.” He referred to himself as “The Thing.”

  Within two months, he was serious about her. He took her home to Miss Patty’s one night and lingered on the porch. “Little,” he said. “I think I’m falling in love with you.” A diamond and sapphire ring quickly followed, and before long, he’d give her a car, a 1957 Ford.

  At first Anita wasn’t sure if she was in love with him or not, mostly because they’d been alone only a few times, and even then not for very long. It gave her serious reservations about their future. They’d go off together on his motorcycle and sit at the big white piano in the music room and sing together for hours. But some of the guys, like Lamar, lived at Graceland, and Lamar even spent the night in Elvis’s room sometimes to keep him from sleepwalking. The cousins were always around, too. Elvis and Gene had that weird little language that only they seemed to be able to decipher (they said “ep skep, skep, skep” a lot), and little Billy was now fourteen, old enough to tag along places.

  When they’d go to the Fairgrounds for crazed nights riding the Pippin, the rickety wooden roller coaster, or rent out the Rainbow Rollerdrome or the Memphian Theatre across town on South Cooper Street, he invited everybody who was at his home, and even the strangers standing around at the gate. “He always invited his fans to go. They would all go to the Fairgrounds—friends, family, and fans.”

  Sometimes the group numbered as many as two hundred. And now Elvis had added another guy to the circle, Alan Fortas, a friend of George’s through the local Jewish organizations. Alan, a big, overfed boy, was a year younger than Elvis, but Elvis already knew who he was—Alan had been an all-Memphis football star at Central High. Given his own mediocre showing on the field in high school, Elvis liked having Alan around. But most of all, he liked Alan because he was full of the devil. Soon, he’d give him a nickname, “Hog Ears.”

  Around the same time, Marty Lacker started coming out to Graceland. A New Yorker who’d moved to Memphis at fifteen in 1952, he’d attended both Central and Humes, so he already knew Alan and George and Red, and to some extent, Elvis. The first time he went out to visit, Elvis and Anita were just coming out of the barn. He, too, would eventually become a part of the group, as would fifteen-year-old Jerry Schilling, who Elvis first met in 1954 through Red West, playing football in Guthrie Park.

  Elvis would brag about Anita to the guys, and everything about her seemed to enchant him. He told his friends he was pretty sure she was a virgin, and he loved it when she showed off her figure. One day it was hot, and Anita suggested they go swimming. Lamar was there, and Elvis turned to Anita in her swimsuit. “Lamar, look at her. Just look at her. That hip is just a little bit bigger than the other hip. But other than that, she’s just perfect. Turn around, Little.”

  Elvis was not alone in appreciating Anita’s attributes. That summer, the Memphis Press-Scimitar ran a photograph of half a dozen girls who would compete on August 22 in the Mid-South finals of the “Hollywood Star Hunt,” a beauty-talent contest that the newspaper sponsored with the Strand Theatre. Of the six, Elvis had dated three—Barbara Hearn, Anita, and Barbara Pittman. Both Anita and Barbara Pittman sang, two of the other women danced, and Barbara Hearn did a dramatic interpretation of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, the climactic burning at the stake scene.

  Anita won and went on to the finals in New Orleans, where she captured the grand prize—a seven-year contract with ABPT, American Broadcasting Paramount Theatres, which also entailed work with Paramount’s movies, television shows, and record label. Elvis told Anita “the things that went on in California were the things that went on in hell.” But Elvis was happy for her and pleased to see that Little was still her unaffected self.

  One morning about six, they were coming home from the roller rink with Lamar and Alan. It had been a ferocious night—they’d played tag and roller derby and the rough game of “knock down,” skating toward each other with all their might with only the winners left standing—and everybody was bruised and battered. Elvis whispered something to Anita in the backseat, but Alan, sitting next to Lamar in the front, couldn’t make it out. Suddenly, Anita leaned forward.

  “Hey, y’all, my cunt hurts.”

  What? Alan wasn’t sure he’d understood her. Surely she hadn’t said what he thought she’d said. Lamar was driving and just sat frozen at the wheel. “God,” he thought, “did I hear that? I have never—”

  “Did y’all hear me? I said, ‘My cunt really hurts!’ ”

  Lamar almost ran off the road—he had to stop the car—and Alan doubled over. Elvis fell on the floor, choking now, barely able to catch his breath.

  “He had a Pepsi in his hand that just went up in the air all over the seat,” Anita says, “and they just died laughing.” She didn’t know why they were making such a big thing of it. Elvis had told her that now that she was going to Hollywood, she had to know the L.A. word for behind. And her rump was sore.

  “He loved to pull tricks. I was so embarrassed when I found out what I’d said. It’s not that I was dumb. My family didn’t talk ugly words, and I was just very naïve.”

  Anita was also ingenuous about Elvis’s ability to be faithful. Two weeks before the finals of the “Hollywood Star Hunt,” he had brought the British-born starlet Venetia Stevenson to Memphis. She had been divorced from Russ Tamblyn, Elvis’s Hollywood acquaintance, only since Valentine’s Day.

  “He’d always come to me and say, ‘But, Little, you know these are just publicity stunts. It doesn’t mean anything. You’re the only one I care anything about.’ ” For proof, he wrote her mash notes: “I love you, love you, love you, you Little.”

  Anita wanted to think it was true, that even though he had his arms around all those starlets and showgirls (the latest was Vegas singer Kitty Dolan) it didn’t really mean anything. “And gullible me . . . Elvis could make you believe anything.”

  She moved into Graceland in 1957 and lived upstairs. “That got to be a hot and heavy affair,” in Lamar’s viewpoint. The guys weren’t sure whether she actually slept with him—there were two other bedrooms on the second floor—but they assumed not. Anita was too proper for sex before marriage, and Gladys wouldn’t have liked it going on under her roof.

  Either way, says Marty Lacker, Elvis reverted to his usual ways when she was out of the house.

  “One time Anita went out shopping, and Elvis brought another girl upstairs. He was fooling around with her in the bedroom, when all of a sudden, one of the guys called up and said, ‘Hey, Elvis, Anita’s coming through the gate.’

  “If you looked out his window, it was a straight drop to the ground. So we put a ladder up to the window. He let the girl climb down first, and he waited about five minutes, and then he went down. Anita came in and went upstairs, and, of course, he wasn’t there. He walked around the back of the house to the front and came upstairs behind her. He said, ‘Oh, you’re home. Great.’ He would do stuff like that all the time.”

  When she found out about the other women, she was hurt and angr
y, but she rationalized it as the actions of a man in a unique situation. “They were all available, and it was a great temptation, and he succumbed to it.”

  And he was also her first love. Now she cared so much for him that when she went out to California for a movie role, she realized she didn’t really want a career if it kept them apart.

  “He called me on the phone. ‘Little, I miss you. I want you to come home.’ Well, I just said okay. He met me at the airport.” Eventually she would give up her whole career.

  It hadn’t meant a lot to her anyway. Her parents had always wanted her to be an entertainer, because God had given her a voice, and she did like to act and sing. “But really and truly, I just wanted to get married and have children and be a normal person. Well, with Elvis, you could never be normal. I found that out right away.”

  The Colonel, for example, insisted that she and Elvis stay at different hotels when she accompanied him to California. His fans would leave him if they thought he was in love, Parker argued, and so Elvis should just say that he and Anita were dating. The manager didn’t even want them photographed together, or if they were, he said, Anita should look away from the camera, and from Elvis, too. He certainly didn’t want her looking happy.

  But there she was, right behind him, smiling like a newlywed backstage at the Tupelo Fair in late September. The Colonel chomped hard on his cigar. But nobody seemed to notice. They were talking about those big pelvic thrusts that Elvis did onstage. Wow, where did he learn to do that?

  On October 28, 1957, a who’s who of show business celebrities were among the nine thousand in attendance on the first of Elvis’s two nights at the Pan Pacific Auditorium in Los Angeles. That evening, Elvis not only gave the most incendiary performance of his career, but he also scandalized himself in a lascivious display that surpassed anything the majority of his audience had ever seen. Harnessing all his power as a sexual revolutionist, he went far beyond his inflammatory appearance on The Milton Berle Show, and even his recent act at the Tupelo Fair.