by Alanna Nash
In 1974, a year before their three-month romance, JoCathy Brownlee met a seemingly dazed Elvis at the Memphian Theater. (Courtesy of JoCathy Brownlee Elkington)
Late in life, Elvis still looked for young girls to mentor. One of the last was fourteen-year-old Reeca Smith, who hoped to become a model. “I think she is a wonderful girl, and I have great intentions,” Elvis told her father in late 1974. (Courtesy of Reeca Smith Gossan)
The night Elvis met model-actress Mindi Miller in 1975, he persuaded her to give up her life in Rome to be his girlfriend. He’d had a premonition she would know him. (Courtesy of Mindi Miller)
Elvis hugs Shirley Dieu, Joe Esposito’s girlfriend, on vacation in Hawaii, March 1977. “He always told me he wanted someone who would love him like I loved Joe,” she says. (Courtesy of Shirley Dieu)
Elvis’s relationship with twenty-year-old Ginger Alden was the source of much of his frustration in his last year. (Robin Rosaaen Collection)
After Elvis’s passing, Linda Thompson (shown here in October 1977 on the set of Hee Haw), went on to enjoy her own show business career, particularly as a songwriter with composer and record producer David Foster. (Alanna Nash)
One reason Elvis may not have tried very hard with Raquel was because since October 1963 he had been seeing Gail Ganley, a dancer from Kissin’ Cousins. One day the brunette was in the middle of rehearsing a dance number when suddenly there was a hand on her shoulder. For a moment, it stunned her—not because of who it was, but because he looked remarkably like her former boyfriend.
“He had a blond wig on, playing the part of the twin, and he said, ‘Hello, there,’ in this beautiful low voice, ‘I’m Elvis Presley. What’s your name?’ By the second week of shooting, he made it known that he was very interested and he wanted me to go out with him.”
Gail, much like Barbara Hearn before her, bore a great resemblance to Elizabeth Taylor. Whether she reminded Elvis of his younger days in Memphis, he was like a teenager in his pursuit: Gail had been knitting a sweater on the set, and she returned to her chair one day to find it unraveled. Then after she filmed a scene in which she had to be barefoot, Elvis came up and said, “I couldn’t stand it anymore. I have to tell you that I hid your shoes.”
As usual, he had one of the guys invite her to the house, but it scared her, and like Raquel, she turned him down, making up an excuse of having to attend a bridal shower. The next day, she thought better of it and brought a box of See’s candy to the set, giving it to one of the entourage to take to him. Elvis invited her to his trailer.
“Did you think about me last night?” he teased. After that, she gave in.
The first time she came to the house, they just watched television, and he kissed her good night like a gentleman. Gail was relieved. She’d had only the one boyfriend. But she had a history of a different kind—she was the last of the Howard Hughes starlets, and she’d just sued the mysterious billionaire over her unfulfilled contract. When Hollywood columnist Harrison Carroll showed up on the Kissin’ Cousins set to interview her, Elvis was enthralled. In fact, it made her more attractive to him, as in a roundabout way, it linked her to Debra Paget, in whom Hughes took a personal interest. But it also made Elvis nervous—was she going to talk about him next? Soon, however, he got over it.
Their first night in the bedroom, he made no attempt to undress her. Instead, they talked and cried all night about their lost loves—her boyfriend, his mother—and he was “careful with his hands,” she remembers. “Elvis made me feel like I was a queen, like a very, very special person.”
She immediately fell in love with him, and she was surprised that it took her such a short time to forget the guy who jilted her. The relationship lasted fifteen months, through three film productions.
“At one point, I had to ask Elvis about other ladies in his life. He said, ‘Well, I don’t want to talk about that. There’s somewhat of a commitment down the road, [but] I don’t know if I can keep it. Right now, we’re dating each other and there’s nobody in my life.’ ”
Counting Ann-Margret, Yvonne Craig, Cynthia Pepper, and Priscilla, who went with him to California on the film, Gail Ganley was at least the fifth woman Elvis courted during the seventeen-day shoot of Kissin’ Cousins.
Psychologist and Presley biographer Peter O. Whitmer says that Elvis’s behavior fits the description of satyriasis, an uncontrollable and abnormal sexual desire in men, the equivalent of nymphomania in women. And yet, “Of all aspects of male sexuality, the concept of satyriasis is as time-honored a behavior as it is difficult to define.” The ancient Greeks sculpted statues of the desire-reveling man-child, epitomizing the charming carelessness of youth. The ancients also held to the sacred customs of “satyr dances,” or religiously observed and licentiously performed moratoriums on morals, staged to glorify fertility and the central act of sex.
In the 1970s, sex researcher Judith Singer Kaplan, emphasizing the psychological origins of what she termed the “Sexual Desire Disorder,” divided this behavior into six levels, the top being “Hyper Active,” where individuals are simply unable to regulate their desires, and they engage in frequent, compulsive sex, many experiencing several orgasms a day.
“For Elvis,” says Whitmer, “it seems essential that his psychological baggage as a twinless twin be seen as creating his hypersexual desire. Childhood trauma is generally accepted as the basic cause for such disorders. In his case, the trauma of being a surviving twin was infused into his psyche before birth, and resulted in an exaggerated need for human contact. This was perpetuated by his relationship with Gladys.”
As Elvis reached puberty, especially, Whitmer posits, “Human contact, sexual or otherwise, replicated his first memories of touching another human and provided him with a lodestone to his most meaningful sense of identity—having been ‘whole,’ one of a pair of twins. It was a ‘desire’ that controlled him, not vice versa.”
In interviews with twinless twins, the psychologist reports, these two themes—the insatiable, yet impossible need for human contact, and their lack of control over it—appear nearly universal. Studies show that twinless twins experience divorce and sexual dysfunctions at rates far higher than normal. A commonly heard and emblematic quote: “How can I become—or stay—married, when someone else was there at the very beginning?”
On April 30, 1964, during the making of Roustabout, Elvis met Larry Geller, who would change his life in profound ways. Larry, who had lived in Los Angeles since the age of eight and gone to beauty school with Patti Parry, was a hairdresser in the salon of Jay Sebring, whose celebrity clients included Warren Beatty and Steve McQueen. Elvis’s usual hairdresser, Sal Orifice, was unavailable, and Elvis was looking for someone who did good work and didn’t mind traveling once in awhile.
“I was styling Johnny Rivers’s hair one afternoon, and the phone rang and it was Alan Fortas. I picked it up and I heard this southern drawl, and Alan said, ‘Elvis heard about you and he wants you to come up to the house to fix his hair.’ ”
Larry showed up at Perugia Way around 4 P.M. that day, and as they talked, Elvis found him both personable and engaging, especially when Larry launched into a discussion about the subject closest to his heart—esoteric studies and the metaphysical.
Elvis nearly bolted up in his chair.
“What you’re talking about,” Elvis told him, eager for a connection, “is what I secretly think about all the time.” Suddenly it was as if Larry had opened a vital passageway that Elvis couldn’t wait to enter. He began to talk intently about what his mother had told him, that he was living for two, and that he had been destined for something great. He admitted that he thought of himself as “chosen,” but he didn’t know why or what his real purpose was in life. “Why was I plucked out of all of the millions and millions of lives to be Elvis Presley? Why did this happen to me?”
As they talked on, Larry could see that the basic stream that ran through Elvis’s life was not so much a desire to get closer to God, but rather a quest
for happiness and for an understanding of his place in the grand scheme of things. Larry, who had grown up in the Jewish faith before exploring Eastern philosophies, explained the concept of “the divine I” and told Elvis he would bring him some books to read that might lead him on a path to spiritual discovery.
The following morning, as Elvis reported to Paramount for publicity stills, Larry turned up at the studio with several classics, including Joseph S. Benner’s tiny spiritual volume, The Impersonal Life, first published in 1917. That book in particular would become one of Elvis’s favorites. He would read and reread it studiously through the years, giving out annotated copies to friends, especially women, saying, “You have to read this.”
For the next month, Elvis dedicated himself to learning more about Eastern religion and spiritual disciplines. Larry, Elvis decided, would be his tutor. He coaxed the hairdresser into quitting his job with Jay Sebring and going to work for him both as his hairstylist and as his spiritual adviser. Soon they were spending far more time one on one than Elvis had ever spent with anyone else in the group. Larry would take him down to the Bodhi Tree, the spiritual bookstore on Melrose Avenue, where they’d keep the store open after hours just for Elvis. Then the two of them would hole up together in the bathroom at the house, talking for at least an hour or two each evening and reading passages from Autobiography of a Yogi, Cheiro’s Book of Numbers, and Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, which Elvis had once received as a gift from June Juanico.
Elvis liked the fact that Larry was Jewish and told him that, technically, he was, too, since Gladys’s maternal grandmother, Martha Tackett, was of Hebrew descent. Elvis would soon start to wear a small chai around his neck, “to hedge my bets,” he would say. And that December, he would add a Jewish star to Gladys’s grave marker.
One of the topics Elvis wanted to probe with Larry was how sex and spirituality could coexist in a pure state of mind. Larry told him that sex was the most important energy in life, that “we got here through sex, but we have to be able to understand our sexual nature. If you dissipate that energy and use it in the wrong way,” he warned Elvis, “it will come back and destroy you—make you physically ill and lead you down some very strange paths with the wrong people. But if you learn how to harness that energy and be with one person, your mate, then it can uplift you.
“That’s what God wants,” Larry said. “That’s the original design for creation.”
The subject of sex and love was much on Elvis’s mind, Larry saw, because “he was living different lives within that body, and he was always in a battle. He fought with himself. He was raised in this ethical stream of church, and to do the right thing and never betray. And yet he became somebody else. He became Elvis, and he attempted to show everyone that he was superman.”
That June 1964, during the filming of Girl Happy, Larry was talking with Elvis on the MGM back lot about 1 A.M. when Ann-Margret came on the set. “It was the first time I ever saw her, and she was really beautiful. This girl glowed.”
Elvis asked the two of them to come into his dressing room trailer so Larry could do his hair. “He was like a little boy around her. You could just see he was enamored. He really, truly cared for her.”
Not long after, Elvis confided to Larry about his dilemma. “I have to make a decision,” he said. “It’s between Ann-Margret and Priscilla. I really love them both, but I’m choosing Priscilla because I want a wife who isn’t in show business, somebody who will devote herself to a family. Besides, I think our egos would clash.”
Elvis was also mindful of his promise to Priscilla’s stepfather. But that was problematic, too, Marty Lacker notes: “Elvis’s infatuation with Priscilla started wearing off early, right after she first came. But he put up with her because he didn’t want to hurt her, and because she was convenient.” Elvis was rearing Priscilla, but the dynamic was changing. “I’ll give you Elvis’s relationship with Priscilla in a nutshell,” says Lamar Fike. “You create a statue. And then you get tired of looking at it.”
When Priscilla came on the set of Girl Happy, a bathing-suit-and-babes romp set in Fort Lauderdale during spring break, she struck actress Chris Noel precisely the same way. “She sat in one of those director’s chairs, her hair piled up real high, and she was like a statue. She never moved. She just sat there staring.”
There was no communication, remembers Chris, who played a bikini-clad coed, and Elvis didn’t introduce her to anyone. “She gave off an untouchable vibe. Like, ‘I’m here because I have to be, but don’t anyone dare speak to me.’ So nobody said anything to her.” The actress thought Priscilla was stuck-up, but she also felt sorry for her. “It was like she didn’t have any friends, like she wasn’t even allowed to have a friend.”
Priscilla probably suspected that Elvis was distracted on the set when she wasn’t around. And, in fact, he was.
“He came on to me in a very strange way,” Chris says. “I was sitting in a chair one day, engrossed in watching people move things around on the set, when all of a sudden, there was this tongue in my ear. I was pretty defensive. I didn’t know who it was, and my reaction was to snap, ‘Lay off.’ And I turned around and it was Elvis. He said, ‘W-w-w-whud you say?’ Oh, my gosh, I almost died! How could I tell Elvis to lay off? But I did. I said, ‘You heard what I said.’ So he said, ‘Okay, if that’s how you feel.’ He knew that wasn’t a cool thing to do.”
She thought he would never speak to her again. But right after that, they were walking toward each other on the lot and, “Just over and over, he started singing ‘Leon,’ ‘Leon,’ ‘Leon,’ which is ‘Noel’ backward. He had quite a sense of humor.”
If Chris was Elvis’s love interest on the picture, his relationships with the other women on the set went a long way toward completing a familiar triad. Here, Shelley Fabares, on her first of three Elvis pictures, stood in for Jessie Garon. He constantly cut up with her the same way he had with Betty Amos on the Louisiana Hayride, teasing her all the time and elbowing her in the ribs. When Elvis sang “Puppet on a String,” Charlie Hodge remembered, “He’d say the P in the song, and her hair would go. . . . And they’d get to laughing. [The director] just sent them home. He said, ‘We’ll shoot around you.’ And they came back the next day and finally got it shot. He loved doing things with Shelley. . . . I think [she] was probably his favorite star.”
“Talk about brother and sister,” says Chris. “He totally adored her, because she wasn’t coming on to him like a bombshell.”
Neither was Mary Ann Mobley, Miss America of 1959, who was making her first film after five years of musicals and guest shots in episodic television.
“We never had any kind of romantic association,” Mary Ann explains, “because you were either one of the girls, or you were a lady. (‘Where is Mary Ann’s chair?,’ he asked the guys.) I was never invited to the house. He used to say, ‘Mary Ann, one day I’m going to have a party I can invite you to.’ He was very conscious of that. And I took that as a compliment.”
They enjoyed a true platonic friendship, she says, even though she found him completely arresting. (“The attraction was there. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who had such a dynamic presence as Elvis.”) But if he took comfort that Mary Ann was a dark-haired Mississippi girl like his mother (“He said, ‘If you ever need us, just call,’ and gave me his number”), for Mary Ann, “It was like I was working with my brother. He didn’t have to put on airs with me, and I wasn’t after anything. He thought I understood him, and I think I did.”
As an example, Elvis took time to share with her what was on his mind. He told her about his brother and said he was reading a lot of books about the metaphysical, and he asked if she ever wondered about the things that happened in her life.
“I said, ‘All the time.’ And he said, ‘I do, too, especially about why I lived and Jessie Garon didn’t.’ I think he was looking for answers. He knew there should be answers, but he wasn’t sure how to find them.”
Their conversation got back
to Colonel Parker, who wasn’t pleased to hear about it, fearing Elvis’s constant talk about spiritual searching might make him seem unstable in the view of the studio heads. Parker, Priscilla, and most of the entourage also took a dim view of Elvis’s new course of thought. And though Elvis was the one who had reached out to Larry Geller and invited him into the group, they viewed Elvis’s new guru with jealousy and suspicion, if not derision. (Lamar called him “the swami.”)
From one chance meeting, they thought, Larry had upended almost everything about Elvis’s life. The nightly parties continued, but now Elvis was spouting philosophy and religion, not playing pool. Instead of seeing Larry as a positive force who brought depth and challenge to a man desperately in need of change, nearly everyone in the group regarded Larry as a disruptive interloper who threatened the status quo.
“Elvis was very much into all this unknown stuff, and Larry came along at the right time,” offers Joe Esposito. “I wasn’t into it that much, so whenever those conversations started taking place, I would disappear. I just didn’t trust Larry too much. I thought Larry was out for Larry and that was it.”
Larry was acutely aware of what they thought. One day the Colonel said, “You missed your calling, Larry.” It was a sly remark, a put-down from the old carny. “I knew that he was speaking metaphorically, that he thought I was a magician, that I had power and that I was hypnotizing Elvis. And yes, it was true on one level. But it had nothing to do with putting someone in a trance or playing with his subconscious mind. My whole motive with Elvis was to be as truthful as I knew how. All I wanted was for Elvis to be his own man. What does that mean? That means opening your eyes. It means waking up—not being hypnotized by influences and suggestions.”