Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  Now, on October 4, after an eighteen-hour flight from New York to Frankfurt, the Presley party drove to Bad Homburg and checked into the Ritters Park Hotel, a resort spa that offered thermal baths as palliative care for patients with bad hearts and respiratory ailments. Elvis joined his family for dinner at the hotel as a crowd collected outside.

  Within days, Elvis got permission to live off base with his dependents, i.e., Vernon and Minnie Mae, and moved the entire group to the Hilberts Park Hotel in Bad Nauheim, an Old World, cobblestoned spa town of fourteen thousand people. There, they occupied four rooms on the third floor.

  On weekends, Charlie Hodge came up from his post ten miles away. The two were close now, having bonded during the crossing. Charlie had been a regular on the Ozark Jubilee TV show, so he and Elvis knew the same country stars (Elvis asked a lot about Wanda Jackson), the same gospel stars, and the same songs.

  They’d put on a talent show on the ship, Elvis playing piano but not singing. And after he was assigned to sergeant’s quarters—his fellow G.I.s wouldn’t leave him alone—he requested that Charlie be allowed to bunk with him. It helped stave off his loneliness and the pain of losing his mother. Despite his father, grandmother, and Anita, he felt totally alone in the world. Just before he left, another G.I. had given him a little book, an anthology, Poems That Touch the Heart. He read the pieces about motherhood and death over and over until he finally drifted off to sleep.

  “I could hear Elvis dreaming sometimes at night, and I’d get out of my bunk and sit down and start talking to him, maybe joke with him a little bit, get him in a little better mood. He said years later, ‘Charlie, if it hadn’t been for you,’ he said, ‘You kept me sane all the way across the ocean.’ ”

  Each morning, Elvis left early for the base, traveling by taxi or hitching a ride from Sergeant Jones. He was back by 6 P.M., except on Fridays, when he helped clean the barracks (his was number 3707, on the ground floor) and latrines for Saturday’s inspection.

  But three weeks later, the group moved again. Someone more famous than Elvis now occupied the hotel, oil sheik Ibn Saud, the king of Saudi Arabia, who arrived with his harem of wives, a dozen children, and an assorted entourage, all in Bedouin gear. The king handed out gold watches instead of autographs, and Elvis felt upstaged, as Lamar saw it. “He didn’t like it that the king attracted all that attention.”

  And so the Presley camp rented the top floor of Bad Nauheim’s elegant and luxurious Hotel Grunewald, a small three-story family establishment festooned with ornamental spires, located at Terrassenstrasse 10. Everyone but Red and Lamar, who shared a room, had his own quarters, decorated with antique furniture and crystal chandeliers. The wealthy clientele was elderly—Red said they all “looked like they had one foot in the grave and the other one on a roller skate”—but Elvis was happy there. “We put in a kitchen,” Lamar recalls, “and Elvis rented a separate room just for the bags of mail.” Soon, he would receive between five thousand and ten thousand letters a week.

  Among them would be almost daily missives from Colonel Parker. He typed them himself, using the hunt-and-peck method, apprising Elvis and Vernon of all his hard work and bragging about his efforts. Before Elvis sailed for Europe, Parker promised him he would be a bigger star when he came home than he had been when he left. Already, the manager had negotiated new contracts with Twentieth Century-Fox and Paramount for huge increases in fees—$150,000 more than what Elvis would have gotten under the original contract at Paramount, he crowed.

  The Colonel couldn’t travel to Europe because as an illegal alien, he had no passport. But even from afar, he ruled with an iron hand. When Elvis told him Anita Wood was planning to come for an extended visit, Parker insisted she stay home. The press would have them engaged or getting married, and Elvis didn’t need that kind of publicity, especially not now.

  On October 28, 1958, Elvis wrote Anita a three-page letter on Hotel Grunewald stationery. He called her often (“weird hours . . . very late, because the time change was so different”), but this was his first letter to her from Europe, and his first ever “in a hundred years,” he said. But there were so many things he wanted to tell her and couldn’t say over the phone, he wrote, his handwriting making big loops of his ts and ys.

  His words were intensely romantic, Elvis lapsing into predictable lovers’ language about how much he missed her, and saying he kept her picture by his bed. But then, after insisting, “I haven’t dated a single girl since I have been here,” he took on a serious tone.

  I want to explain something to you, and you have got to trust me and believe me, because I am very sincere when I say it. I will tell you this much. I have never and never will again love anyone like I love you, sweetheart. Also, I guarantee that when I marry, it will be Miss Little Presley Wood. There is a lot you have to understand, though. Only God knows when the time will be right. So you have to consider this and love me, trust me and keep yourself clean and wholesome, because that is the big thing that can determine our lives and happiness together.

  No matter what I’m doing, whether it be the army, making movies, traveling or singing, I will be thinking of the time when we have our first “little Elvis Presley.” So keep this in mind and don’t get discouraged and lonely. Just remember this is a guy that loves you with all his heart and wants to marry you.

  Such demonstrative words must have been a comfort to Anita. Except what Elvis didn’t mention was that on October 5, while showing his family around a park in Bad Homburg, twenty-three-year-old Elvis had met sixteen-year-old Margit Buergin, a pretty blond stenographer for an electrical company in Frankfurt. It had happened as soon as they left the Ritters Park Hotel that evening, when a group of shutterbugs from the German tabloids “descended on us like a horde of locusts,” in Lamar’s words. Robert Lebeck, well known for his photographs of politicians and show business personalities, had asked the petite beauty to come with him, thinking a pose of the most famous American G.I. with an attractive German girl would make a salable picture. Lebeck asked Elvis to kiss her, and Elvis obliged, and then wanted more. He began seeing her immediately.

  Elvis was so smitten with her that he mentioned her in his one letter to Alan Fortas, which he wrote from maneuvers in Grafenwöhr, Bavaria, on November 14. “I have been dating this little German ‘Chuckaloid’ by the name of Margit. She looks a lot like B.B. [Brigitte Bardot]. It’s Grind City [a steamy affair].”

  The German papers made a big splash of the couple, and soon she was the most-talked-about woman in the country, receiving dozens of letters a day. “She’s blond and has blue eyes,” Elvis told an Armed Forces Network reporter. “I’ve seen her about five times already, which is more than any other girl ’round here.” He bought her a wristwatch, and she showed it off in the press. Elvis called her “Little Puppy.”

  Back in Memphis, the other “Little” blinked at what she read. She could believe that reporters made up quotes sometimes, as Elvis always told her. But Anita’s face flushed when she saw the pictures of him with his arms around another blonde, holding her close and looking deeply into her eyes. She fired off three letters to him about her disappointment.

  “Well, I can’t blame you,” Elvis quickly answered, “especially since that mess was written about ‘Little Puppy,’ and all that horseshit.” He then explained how they met, that she was a photographer’s model, and a newsman had brought her over the first week he was in Germany.

  “I have seen her one time since then,” he lied, his letter postmarked on the same day he told Alan about his affair. “I have not been dating her, and . . . I have not tried to keep anything from you. . . . Every night, I lay in my bunk, I see your little eyes and your little nose, and it’s almost like you are here, like you are pressed up close to me. I can feel your little hair on the side of my face and sometimes I get so excited and want you so bad I start sweating. WOW!”

  In closing, he told her their song from now on was “[Please] Love Me Forever,” by Tommy Edwards. “Every night
I play it just for you,” Elvis wrote.

  But he was also playing the record for Margit. He was seeing her several times a week now, either in Bad Nauheim or at the home she shared with her mother in Frankfurt-Eschersheim. He drove the thirty miles alone in his white BMW 507, parking his car in the American Forces Network lot, with the staff instructed not to bother him. As the relationship wore on, he sent a taxi driver, Josef Wehrheim, to Frankfurt for her twice a month.

  Elvis and Margit went to the movies, to the Frankfurt Zoo, talked in back corners of nightclubs where they could hold hands undisturbed (he particularly liked La Parisienne), and cuddled at the parties Elvis held at the hotel. They were known to spend the night together on several occasions in both cities. But the romance was hampered by the fact that Margit spoke only minimal English, and so they communicated in other ways.

  “He is shy and rarely speaks about himself,” the teenager told reporter Mike Tomkies about her boyfriend. “He’s not at all conceited. He doesn’t like to go out often. We spend evenings listening to pop records, or he would play the piano and sing folk songs. . . . He plays the guitar, and says as little as possible about his success as a singer.”

  But if Elvis was modest, Margit was eager for attention and posed for cheesecake shots published in Overseas Weekly, the American G.I. magazine. Look magazine, too, would feature them together, Margit saying, “He’s so different from what I thought he’d be.” Elvis was embarrassed—it put him in more of a jam with Anita—and he felt exploited.

  “She went and got herself pinup pictures made,” Red said at the time, “and spread them all over the front pages as Elvis Presley’s German fräulein. Elvis doesn’t like that. It made him mad. He certainly liked her a lot, but after that he never saw her again.”

  Lamar remembers it differently. “Elvis dated her on and off the whole time he was in Germany, but the heavy stuff lasted about two months. Then he got tired of her and went to somebody else.”

  When Memphis disc jockey Keith Sherriff asked him about her in a phone interview in early 1959, Elvis replied, “Don’t get me wrong, she’s a cute little girl and all of that, but it’s mostly a lot of publicity.”

  Margit did not take it well. “I feel mad and humiliated,” she complained. “All the girls who envied me so are now busy making jokes about Presley’s ex-girlfriend.”

  Years after their relationship, Margit would suggest that it was she who broke things off, because Elvis insisted that he belonged to his fans, and therefore could not consider marriage.

  “I’m a corporation, not a man,” he told her. “Sure, I want to get married and have kids. But for me it’s impossible.”

  Late in the fall, when Elvis was still involved with Margit, he received a call from Devada “Dee” Elliott Stanley, the wife of Bill Stanley, a much-decorated American master sergeant stationed in Frankfurt. Dee, the mother of three young boys, Billy, Ricky, and David, was unhappy in her marriage. Her husband, who had been one of General George S. Patton’s drivers, was a mean drunk, and Dee found Elvis a delicious diversion. She invited him to dinner with her family, but Elvis had a good excuse—he was about to go to Grafenwöhr, on the Czech border, for six weeks of reconnaissance maneuvers. He’d be up to his elbows in snow.

  However, Vernon, who was growing a Boston Blackie mustache, offered himself as a stand-in for a coffee date. Dee, a bottle blonde given to showy clothing, had a come-hither tone in her voice that let him know she would make it worth his while. The fact that she was married didn’t faze him, since he’d been carrying on his own escapades for years, and had begun fooling around with at least two women in Killeen in the days after Gladys’s death. For her part, Dee wanted anyone who was close to Elvis. “Boy,” says Lamar, “she stalked him like prize game.”

  Like Elvis, Vernon, who started hanging out in the little bars around Bad Nauheim, drinking vodka or bourbon and Coke and buying rounds for women at Elvis’s expense, could compartmentalize sex and love. Before coming overseas, he and his son had gone to the Memphis Memorial Studio and ordered an enormous monument for Gladys’s grave, replete with Italian statuary—a towering cross with a beckoning Jesus and attendant angels. In November, they were proud to learn that the accompanying marker had been completed. The inscription: “She was the sunshine of our home.”

  On November 20, 1958, Elvis and Rex Mansfield went to the movies at the post theater in Grafenwöhr, which was often their habit. Rex, from the little town of Dresden, Tennessee, 120 miles north of Memphis, remained Elvis’s closest army buddy. They’d been inducted together, gone through basic together, and traveled on the same train to New York and ship to Germany. Elvis called him “Rexadus.” There wasn’t much they hadn’t shared.

  Waiting at the theater that night was a nineteen-year-old German girl, Elisabeth Stefaniak, the modest and well-groomed stepdaughter of an American sergeant. Elisabeth was infatuated with everything about Elvis—his looks, his music, his voice, his movies, and his celebrity status. She’d read in Stars and Stripes that Elvis went to the theater every night in Grafenwöhr, entering after the lights went down, and leaving shortly before the movie was over. She saw it as her chance to get an autograph.

  When she got there, “All the G.I.s were coming in, and in their crew cuts they all looked the same. So I asked the manager and he told me approximately where they were sitting.

  “I saw one soldier who was sitting in that area get up, and he came back to get some popcorn. I was waiting in the lobby in the dark, and I asked him, ‘Are you sitting anywhere near Elvis?’ and he said, ‘Yes, in fact, I’m sitting right next to him.’ I said, ‘Would you please just get me an autograph?’ And he said, ‘Sure,’ and went back inside.” Moments later, Rex appeared and told her that Elvis would like her to come down and sit with him.

  Elvis took a shine to the dark-haired girl, finding her body, as he would later tell Joe Esposito, “voluptuous.” He walked her home that evening and surprised her with a good-night kiss. For the next six nights, she met him at the theater, and then he dropped in at her apartment unexpectedly for Thanksgiving and met her parents.

  “Everything was ‘Yes, ma’am’ and ‘No, ma’am,’ ” Elisabeth remembers. “They were very impressed.” He talked about his mother, of course, but surprisingly, the only time Elisabeth saw tears in his eyes was when he talked about his father. “He was hurt that his mother had just passed away and his father was already dating.”

  After that first visit to her apartment, he came every day, often at odd times, sometimes for meals or talks with the family, and sometimes to take Elisabeth to the movies. Her family felt comfortable with him, and he liked the close, homey atmosphere. When his maneuvers were over, and he was about to return to Bad Nauheim, he gave her parents a 365-day gold clock. Elvis and Elisabeth’s stepfather, Raymond “Mac” McCormick, spent hours putting it together.

  It was a calculated gift, of course: He told Elisabeth’s parents he had about fifty duffel bags of fan mail, and he needed a secretary who could read and write both German and English. Elisabeth was perfect for the job, since she had lived in the States for a time and was fluent in both languages. She could stay in her own private room at the Hotel Grunewald, he told them. “I assure you that she will be in good hands with me and my father and grandmother, and we will take full responsibility for her.”

  “You think about it,” he said to Elisabeth as he left. “You don’t have to give me an answer now, darlin’. I’ll call you in a couple of days.”

  But she didn’t have to think about it, and neither did her parents. Elvis had said her duties would start at the first of the year, but three days later he called and asked how soon she could come. “I can be there in one week,” she told him, and arrived on the train the first part of December. Bad Nauheim was 351 kilometers from Grafenwöhr, or 218 miles, and she’d never been away from her parents for any real length of time, or even taken a train ride that far by herself. It was all a great adventure.

  Vernon, Lamar, and Re
d picked her up at the station and drove her to the Hotel Grunewald, and on the way, Vernon explained that she would be working for him, not Elvis, at a salary of thirty-five dollars a week, paid on Fridays. Minnie Mae would be her foremost companion. The old woman, who perpetually parked a toothpick in the side of her mouth for dipping snuff, was looking forward to some female companionship, and she insisted that the teen call her Grandma. Elisabeth thought she had a grand sense of humor.

  “We hit it off that night, and I knew we would be great friends. She accepted me right away like one of the family.”

  But Elisabeth wasn’t precisely sure what her relationship was with Elvis, since they’d only kissed in Grafenwöhr. That first evening, he made it clear. He came downstairs to her room and said he would be spending the night with her. Elvis saw a look of worry cross her face and told her not to be concerned, that he didn’t have full intercourse with girls “he was going to see on a regular basis,” because he didn’t want to run the risk of getting her pregnant. “Such a risk would damage his reputation and image,” Elisabeth remembers him saying. “That first night we sort of played around. Over the course of the next weeks and months, I went to bed with him almost every night.”

  He called her “Foghorn,” because her voice was so low in the mornings, and she took it as a term of endearment. She worked hard on answering the mail, practicing his signature for a week (though eventually reverting to a rubber stamp), but she also wondered how long she would be on the job, or even if he would continue to be her lover. As she soon learned, “No woman could hold Elvis Presley’s attention for very long.” Only days after her arrival, he took another girl to bed, and after he dispatched Lamar to drive her home, he knocked three times on the wall between their bedrooms, signaling Elisabeth to come to him.