Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  In Palm Springs, the guys found their female companions by trolling the streets, using Elvis as bait, and always coming back to the house with carloads of women. “We talked, smoked grass, drank, went for late swims, and even had orgies,” Joe wrote in his memoir. One night, everyone was out at the pool. Charlie, Red, Sonny, and Joe were splashing around with several girls they’d met earlier that night, and Elvis laid on the lounge chair with one of his guests. After awhile, they quietly slipped off to his room.

  As things got livelier around the pool, Red came out of his swimming trunks, and in no time, bathing suits were flying around everywhere, guys chasing girls, and girls chasing guys. Elvis heard the commotion and came out to investigate, wearing only a towel around his waist.

  “Come on in!” they yelled.

  “You guys are having too much fun,” Elvis answered, laughing.

  Then he noticed that the girls were nude, and while he took it all in, Joe wrote, Red sneaked around in back of him and pulled off his towel. Elvis, though oversexed, had always been surprisingly modest—even prudish—about showing himself to women, and he stood there in shock for a second, and then, embarrassed, jumped in the pool. When he finally got out, he wrapped a towel tightly around his midsection and went back to his room for the rest of the night.

  More and more, Elvis seemed pulled between the quests of hedonism and heaven. In Palm Springs, where the girls revolved with more frequency than the women in L.A., he was freer to indulge his new habit of preaching to party guests. Joe saw it as just another game he liked to play. This one was “master instructing the multitudes.”

  One late night in Palm Springs, almost everyone had been smoking marijuana, including Elvis. He asked Joe to turn off the television, and he launched into his discourse, emphasizing each key point with a cane he used as a staff.

  This was a pattern that had quickly worn thin with the guys, especially as Elvis would open the Bible and say, “You gotta hear this!” As Elvis began to pace and read, the guys would groan good-naturedly, knowing what was coming. “Verily I say unto you, except ye be converted and become as little children,” he started. Then he interrupted himself.

  “Jesus!” Elvis exclaimed. “This is unbelievable. Listen! ‘But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged around his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea!’ ”

  Suddenly, as if called to deliver the sermon on the mount, Elvis jumped up on the coffee table, pointed his cane at the heavens, and still holding the Bible, began spouting words he never heard at the Assembly of God church: “And Jesus said, ‘Woe ye motherfuckers!’ ”

  “With that,” Joe recounted, “we all fell out laughing, including Elvis, once he’d realized what he’d said. Everyone was rolling on the floor. Someone lit up another joint, and that was the end of Bible class for that night.”

  The Colonel, who had wangled a free home in Palm Springs out of the William Morris Agency, encouraged his client to spend his weekends there, so that he might keep a closer watch on him. In September, Elvis signed a one-year lease on a modern home at 1350 Ladera Circle. It made the Colonel happy, but they spent almost no real time together, and Elvis carried on the same as if Parker were a thousand miles away. He’d started to hate the old codger, whose bad back and massive weight—he tipped the scales at around three hundred pounds now—necessitated that he walk with a cane. When Elvis was particularly displeased with Parker, he’d do dead-on impersonations of him to the guys, and then hang his cane over his erect penis in a not-so-subtle message.

  The two had words in September over a letter Hal Wallis sent the Colonel saying he was concerned about Elvis’s appearance. Wallis cited feedback from film exhibitors who watched Paradise, Hawaiian Style and reported that something must be “radically wrong” with Elvis, as his hair was too black and fluffed up and resembled a wig, and he just didn’t seem like himself. He certainly didn’t fit the profile of a navy frogman, his forthcoming role in Easy Come, Easy Go, which was to begin filming at the Long Beach Naval Station on October 3.

  Elvis didn’t much care, and while he slimmed down for the part, he was short-tempered on the set and fought with director John Rich, whom he hadn’t liked when they worked together on Roustabout.

  One day Elvis and Red got a case of the giggles during a scene, and Rich, angry at what he interpreted as unprofessional behavior, threw the entire entourage off the set. Elvis was livid, as he already believed that the picture, which featured a yoga class and the song “Yoga Is As Yoga Does,” mocked his interest in Eastern philosophy. His paranoia over the Colonel was such that he believed—incorrectly, according to screenwriter Allan Weiss—that Parker had planted it in the script. In later years, he told Larry Geller he regretted doing the scene and should have stood up for himself. Instead, he blew up at Rich and Wallis about the entourage.

  “Now, just a minute,” he told the Paramount brass. “We’re doing these movies because they’re supposed to be fun, nothing more. When they cease to be fun, then we’ll cease to do them.” But he should have said it years earlier. Easy Come, Easy Go was his last picture for Wallis, and none of his seven remaining films for other studios would live up to his expectations.

  Wallis refused to give him his release from the picture until just before Thanksgiving, which Elvis uncharacteristically spent with the Colonel in Palm Springs before heading home to Memphis on his retooled Greyhound.

  Just outside of Little Rock, Arkansas, around Forrest City, Elvis heard his buddy George Klein spin Tom Jones’s new “Green, Green Grass of Home” on his WHBQ radio show. The country weeper, which Elvis turned down when Red brought it to him the year before, now struck a nerve, especially the line “And there to meet me is my mama and papa.” Elvis stopped the bus at a pay phone and had Marty ask George to play it again. “Soon, he was stopping at every pay phone. George played that thing three or four times in a row, which he wasn’t supposed to do.”

  When they got to Graceland, the guys unloaded the bus, and as Marty started to leave, he went in the hallway to see if Elvis needed anything. He was near the front door, next to his parents’ bedroom, kneeling on one knee, his head in his hands, sobbing. Larry was standing over him, trying to console him.

  “Elvis, what’s wrong?” Marty said.

  “Marty, I saw my mama.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I walked in the door, and I saw her standing here. I saw her, man.”

  Elvis went upstairs to his bedroom, which had recently been redecorated in a black-and-red Spanish motif, with two television sets embedded in the green Naugahyde ceiling. The effect of the room was oddly womblike, with an amniotic calm. More and more, Elvis demonstrated a need for just such an atmosphere. Whether his “vision” of Gladys was simply triggered by hearing the song or by what psychiatrists call hallucinations of bereavement, where individuals believe they have actually seen someone who has died, Elvis required time for himself. He stayed upstairs for days, refusing to come down.

  In early December, he had recovered enough to gather the gang at the Memphian nearly every other night, screening Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, After the Fox, with Peter Sellers, Fantastic Voyage, and Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round. Then to torture himself, he slipped in Ann-Margret’s remake of the John Ford classic Stagecoach.

  He’d actually been thinking of all things western lately, including horseback riding, as he had two films coming up—Stay Away, Joe, and Charro!—in which he would probably be required to ride. Just before Christmas, it turned into his latest obsession, and he went on a shopping spree for riding accoutrements and, finally, horses. He would be a gentleman farmer, he thought. By the end of the year, he would have an entire stable of horses and start clearing the area behind Graceland for a riding ring and a barn.

  “My happiest memories of Elvis are the times—there were few of them—when he dropped that wall, when he became t
he person he might have been without all the pressures,” Priscilla says.

  One such time was the day he bought horses for everyone at Graceland. “I can still see him out there in the dirt, in his jeans and heavy coat and cowboy hat, going around, writing everybody’s name on the stalls (‘Daddy’s,’ ‘Priscilla’s,’ ‘Mine’) with a red marking pen—watering the horses, blanketing them. He looked so satisfied, so . . . simple.”

  Two of the horses were bays, and soon he would buy a black quarter horse named Domino as a Christmas present for Priscilla. But on Christmas Eve, he had another gift for her. He walked into her ornate bathroom-dressing room while she was brushing her hair and bent down on one knee and presented her with a small black velvet box. Inside, from Harry Levitch’s jewelry store, was a ring of twenty-one diamonds, one for each year of Priscilla’s young life.

  “Satnin’,” he said, “we’re going to be married.”

  It wasn’t the most romantic place for a proposal, but then it was more of a directive than anything else.

  “I told you I’d know when the time was right. Well, the time’s right.”

  He didn’t really want to marry her at all, according to Sonny. “There was still love there, but the intensity was gone. But he’d given his word to Priscilla’s father, and when it came to her being twenty-one, he asked Elvis to fulfill his obligations. Elvis resisted for a while, and then [Major] Beaulieu spoke to the Colonel. The Colonel went to Elvis and said, ‘You can do one of two things: Marry her or break it off. You can’t continue to live with her, because things will get out.’ ”

  That New Year’s Eve, Elvis held his annual party at the Manhattan Club. But when he got there, he couldn’t find a parking place, and after circling around a few times, he gave up and drove home. While his guests enjoyed a catered dinner to the music of Willie Mitchell and his band, Elvis sat at Graceland, restless and dissatisfied, his foot going a mile a minute.

  Shelley Fabares was paired with Elvis for the third time on Clambake, shot in spring 1967. “I loved doing those pictures,” she said. “They weren’t great, but they were great fun.” Elvis pursued her without success, yet their deep affection transcended the years. (Robin Rosaaen Collection)

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Hitched!

  By early 1967, Elvis owned at least a dozen horses, which meant that he could now play cowboy for real. In 1953, he and Gene Smith had gone to the Mid-South Fair and posed in western hats and holsters for an iconic image of the era, and he’d never gotten over the way it made him feel—tough, brooding, ready to take on the world, even as he felt apart from it.

  Every day he went out in his chaps, boots, Stetson, and rancher coat to check on his growing herd. Lamar called it dressing the part. On the rare occasions when he traveled by air, “he’d put a scarf around his neck and fly the plane. At Graceland, I’d say, ‘Alan, where’s Elvis?’ He’d say, ‘He’s upstairs. He’s in the middle of the bed with his helmet and shoulder pads on, watching Monday Night Football.’ ”

  In late 1966 he went on a horse-buying expedition to find a Tennessee Walker for Vernon. On the drive, he happened upon Twinkletown Farm, a 160-acre cattle ranch near Walls, Mississippi, about ten miles south of Whitehaven. It was daybreak, and before him, a white, sixty-five-foot lighted cross stood in the middle of rolling green hills near a rippling lake. Nearby was a small farmhouse.

  At first glance, Elvis felt as though he’d had the breath knocked out of him: It was a vision nearly as powerful as seeing Christ in the cloud in the desert. Alan was driving Elvis’s double-cab pickup truck, and he had him pull over. The property was for sale, and Elvis took it as a sign that he was meant to have it. He sent Alan to investigate, and almost immediately, Elvis made a $5,000 down payment toward the $437,000 purchase price, which included prize Santa Gertrudis cattle. He would rename the farm the Circle G Ranch, for Graceland, and appoint Alan as foreman to nominally oversee the maintenance and livestock.

  The ranch became Elvis’s new obsession, and at first, he was like a man reborn. He dove in, making extensive renovations and improvements, putting up a fence, building a barn, grading roads, and installing a gas tank. Then he went shopping for farm equipment, breaking out of his self-seclusion long enough to load up the car with the guys and drive to the Sears store at the Southland Mall. He gathered up hammers and nails and hinges for the pasture gates, and even the display model of a twelve-horsepower lawn tractor, taking everybody for a ride when he got home.

  Ray Walker, the tall bass singer of the Jordanaires, couldn’t believe the difference in him. Instead of the apathetic and lethargic Elvis he’d last seen, he now saw a man with a renewed energy for life: “The happiest we ever saw him was when he had that ranch. I think those were the only peaceful, relaxed moments he had in the last ten years of his life. He walked in one day, and we just stood there and stared at him. Finally, he broke into a smile and said, ‘Shall we dance?’ ”

  To Elvis, the Circle G Ranch was not just a place to relax but also a breeding ground for communal dreams. He was thirty-two years old now, and he thought the ranch would allow him the chance to replicate a family, to feel complete in a way he never had with the death of his sibling, and then the loss of Gladys. When he was on maneuvers in Germany, he wrote a letter to Patsy Presley and her parents in which he reminisced about the last Christmas Gladys was alive, when they were all together at Graceland. “You couldn’t read the letter without crying,” Patsy Presley later said. “For Elvis, family was everything.”

  That was one reason he had just allowed his forty-three-year-old aunt, Delta Mae Biggs, to move into Graceland on the death of her husband, Pat, a riverboat gambler and nightclub owner. Pat had instilled the desire in Elvis to make something of himself, and to own a nice house and car, even though Pat himself could never hold on to money. “Family talk was that Pat and Delta had lived the wild life all across the country in casinos and bars,” according to Patsy. “There was a mystique about them, a mysterious past that no one could detail.”

  Delta, a diabetic alcoholic, had a nasty disposition and hated everybody—she flipped the bird to fans and once set fire to her wig because someone liked it and asked her for it. But she was kin, and Pat had left her flat broke, and she had nowhere else to go. Elvis despised her drinking, but he found her antics amusing, and Minnie Mae also liked the idea of having her daughter live with her. That made Elvis happy, too.

  At the Circle G Ranch, Elvis’s initial plan was to build a new home for himself and Priscilla near the cross and the big lake. Then he would give each of the guys an acre of land and the down payment to build his own house, since no one in the group except Marty and Lamar had a home of his own. They would all live there together with their wives and families.

  The guys were ecstatic about the idea, and Joe and Joanie made plans to move from California. But Vernon, punching numbers on his calculator and holding his head, nixed the idea right off. Instead of standing up to his father and saying he was the one who made the money and would do with it what he liked, Elvis honored Vernon’s position as his business manager.

  “How are you going to break it to the guys?” Marty asked. “I’m not,” Elvis said. “You are.”

  He felt bad about it, but then he got another idea: If he couldn’t give them houses, he’d give them house trailers. He bought the first one for Billy, and then found a three-bedroom model for himself and Priscilla. Pretty soon, there were trailers everywhere, twelve in all, to the tune of $140,000. But everybody needed a truck, too. He bought twenty-two in one day—and three more another day—giving them to anyone he could, even the carpenters and electricians working on the place. He couldn’t spend money fast enough.

  He loved to see people’s faces when he did something like that and found gratification in giving people big-ticket items they couldn’t afford themselves. If he had a good feeling or experience from something, he also just wanted to share it. But part of his motivation was swing guilt, a phenomenon of the twinless twin,
says psychologist Whitmer, meaning Elvis felt compelled to earn applause to affirm his oneness, his uniqueness. But then he swung back in the opposite direction out of guilt for being the individual who received all the recognition, instead of his twin.

  Elvis had always been a generous person, beginning in childhood, when he gave away his toys to other children. And long before he bought the ranch, he was already in the habit of buying cars for friends, family, employees, and even strangers. But once he began walking the spiritual path, says Larry Geller, “He started to get very philanthropic, and he really did give away a lot of money and significant gifts. Buying the ranch was a very large manifestation. It freaked Vernon out.”

  More than that, it almost literally gave Elvis’s father a heart attack. Vernon despised it when he gave away money—he frowned on Elvis’s annual Christmas donations—and was preoccupied with the idea of people taking advantage of his son’s generosity. After the truck-buying frenzy, he reminded Elvis that the ranch wasn’t a working farm, so all the money was going out and none was coming in. “Get a ninety-day note and cover it,” Elvis said, nonchalantly.

  “He had a couple of months before he had to go do his next picture, which was Clambake,” Marty recalls, “and he spent almost every day down at the ranch. It was winter. We had a little office by the stable, and one morning about two o’clock we were standing outside there.

  “It was snowing, and Elvis was on a small tractor, pushing the snow and mud out of the way. Vernon walked out of the office and came up to me with an adding machine tape in one hand and a flashlight in the other. He was, like, whining. He said, ‘Marty, look at this! He’s spent $98,000 on trucks and given them away!’ I said, ‘What do you want me to do about it? He’s your son.’ ”