Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  Larry learned about it when he picked up the afternoon paper. Sonny was similarly informed. “I was making a motorcycle movie, and I was on location. I came back to my room, turned the TV on, and the guy said, ‘Elvis Presley got married today . . .’ And I went, ‘What?!’ I thought, ‘Dad gum, that was fast.’ ”

  Hurt feelings ran rampant, and Red, who would remain estranged from Elvis for two years over the exclusion, had a hellacious fight with the Colonel. Charlie later defended the way Parker handled things, saying he was “just doing what he always tried to do with Elvis, and that was keeping something like that from becoming a circus.” But in retrospect, says Joe, “We should have used another arena so that everybody could have been there.”

  The Memphis paper ran the headline “Wedding is Typically Elvis—Quick, Quiet, and in Style,” and fan reaction was mixed. There was no national hue and cry as there would be with Paul McCartney’s marriage two years later, as the new youth of America considered Elvis rather hokey, a has-been. And fans of Kay Wheeler’s ilk had largely moved on, Kay herself saying, “Well, somebody finally caught him. I guess Elvis’s career is so down already that it doesn’t matter anymore.” In Europe, the girls seemed to take it harder.

  On May 4 the married couple flew home from Palm Springs, arriving in Memphis around 6 A.M. After a quick stop at Graceland, they went on to the Circle G to continue their honeymoon. It was there, in one of the trailers, that Priscilla conceived a child, a girl, to be named Lisa Marie, so near the name Elvis and Anita had picked out years before. The baby would be born February 1, exactly nine months after the wedding. It was at the Circle G that Priscilla and Elvis had sex for the first time, they would say. Marrying at a place called the Aladdin was not the only fairy-tale element of the Elvis and Priscilla saga.

  Just because Elvis now wore a wedding band did not mean that either his feelings or his behavior would change. On May 8, one week after he and Priscilla tied the knot, Ann-Margret married Roger Smith, also in Las Vegas. When she opened an engagement there on June 7, Elvis sent flowers in the shape of a guitar. He would do so for each of her Vegas bookings until his death.

  Already Elvis knew his marriage had been a mistake—that he and Priscilla had never truly been compatible, and that they had tragically outgrown their dreams. He had fallen for a fourteen-year-old girl, and she, as an eleven-year-old, for the flickering image of a bad boy, dancing suggestively on TV. Neither of them was the same person now. They had married ghosts.

  On July 1, two months after his wedding, Elvis went to see Ann-Margret’s show, bringing along his father and several of the guys. They visited her in her dressing room afterward. At one point, Ann-Margret slipped off to the innermost room of her dressing area. Elvis followed and shut the door.

  “Our eyes met and suddenly the old connection burned as brightly and strong as it had years before,” she wrote. He complimented her on her show and then turned wistful, thanking her for all the happiness she had given him, and recounting the good times they had shared.

  “Elvis then stepped forward and dropped to one knee. He took my hands in his. I felt the heat in both of our bodies. In a soft, gentle voice weighted by seriousness, he told me exactly how he still felt about me, which I intuitively knew, but was very touched to hear.”

  But as usual, Elvis had not one but three women on his mind. He was making a movie, Speedway, with Nancy Sinatra at MGM, and Priscilla had just learned that she was pregnant. Elvis was thrilled and announced it on the set on July 12. “This is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me,” he gushed to reporters.

  And at home, he affectionately called Priscilla “Belly.”

  “Look who’s talking!” she wanted to say, though Elvis had dieted himself thin again. Still, Priscilla was stung by it, especially as she never even needed a maternity dress.

  “Elvis was always talking about women who let themselves go when they were expecting, who used it as an excuse to gain weight. So I actually lost eight pounds when I was carrying. I ate only eggs and apples. I never drank milk.” She never saw a doctor, either. She never saw anybody new, because Elvis wanted only his same friends around. It was life in a bubble. “We were in a cocoon.”

  At Elvis’s nudging, Nancy offered to throw a baby shower for the new mother. But behind the scenes, she was busy fighting off Elvis’s advances. She had fantasized about him for years, even before she met him on the day he returned from Germany in 1960. Now that she was divorced from Tommy Sands, it was easier to think about being involved with him. But she refused to have sex with a married man, even as she indulged his adolescent games, so reminiscent of the roughhousing he did with his slumber party teens on Audubon Drive.

  At lunchtime, they’d go back to her dressing room trailer. Elvis would mess up her hair and her clothes, teasing her, and when he got especially frisky, he’d pin her to the floor and dry hump her. They’d laugh and giggle and toss back and forth in the mock throes of ecstasy. “Did you come yet?” he’d ask, a big smile on his face. But there was no mistaking that Elvis was truly turned on. “Do you feel Little Elvis?” he’d whisper in her ear. And, of course, she did.

  When they walked out of the trailer for the afternoon’s shoot, people stared at them and whispered behind their backs. Priscilla was well aware of it—she had worried that something was between them as far back as 1960—and somehow they took a bit of perverse pleasure from it. Nancy asked her one day how she kept her figure with the baby and learned that Priscilla ate only one meal. “Good for you,” Nancy praised, but what she was really thinking was, “She’s got her hands full trying to hold on to this man.”

  The flirting, then, had to stop. Near the end of the picture, Nancy was in her trailer alone. Wearing only jeans and a brassiere, she went to her closet to pick out a shirt. She had just removed her bra when Elvis popped out of the closet. It was an awkward moment—she tried to cover herself, and then she laughed. Elvis pulled her to him.

  “He just got very quiet. He just held me . . . and he lifted up my face and he kissed me, and I started to melt. I really thought I was going to die. Then he pulled away and looked at me and said, ‘I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry.’ And he went out.”

  Elvis would appear the supreme cad in pursuing a costar only months after marrying and impregnating his live-in Lolita. But now that Priscilla was going to be a mother, his sexual interest in her had all but disappeared.

  At first he blamed it on the fact that she constantly slathered her stomach with cocoa butter to stave off stretch marks. He couldn’t stand the smell and would have to leave the room. They fought about it—she was so sensitive with her hormones in flux—and one night she threw the whole container at him. He threw nothing back, he later told girlfriend Mindi Miller, because “first of all, she’s a girl and she’s pregnant, and she’s my wife. You don’t do that as a southern gentleman.”

  The larger problem was that Elvis now further equated Priscilla with Gladys. It was a huge psychological and emotional quagmire, Priscilla would say, that neither one of them fully understood. Elvis only knew that any woman who’d had a child was a turnoff for him, and he wanted nothing to do with her sexually.

  “He just didn’t feel comfortable doing that,” says Joe. “Sometimes if I met somebody I was going to introduce him to, I’d tell her, ‘Don’t say you have a kid.’ There were a couple of other girls he dated who were mothers, but he never knew it. In other words, they weren’t big affairs, just small little events.”

  “I guess he had a Madonna complex,” Priscilla sums up. While she has written that having Lisa Marie was the end of intimacy, she now says, “No, no, of course we were having sex! I mean, he was Elvis, after all, and I must say he was very creative, very playful.’ ”

  Just after the wedding, when Elvis and Priscilla returned to the ranch, it was a “magical time,” says Jerry. Elvis was calm and happy, Priscilla was glad to be out of Graceland and the big L.A. houses, and everyone got along. They really did feel like one big family,
Jerry thought. “Somehow, after a false start, Elvis’s dream of a cowboy commune seemed to be working perfectly.”

  But by August, Elvis had lost interest in the ranch, and Vernon began to sell off the trucks, the trailers, and the cattle, and soon he would look for buyers for the land, too. Dr. Nick had already observed that this was a pattern with Elvis: “He never seemed to be attached to anything for very long. He would pick up a sport or some new thing, and it would last just a few weeks or a few months.”

  When Elvis did spend time at the ranch, he wasn’t so interested in horses as he was in target practice. That was his new fixation now, and he started buying rifles, clay targets, and ear protectors with all the zeal he poured into his earlier hobbies. That October, he got whatever western fix he needed on his last picture of the year, Stay Away, Joe, where he again played a Native American, this time as a rodeo rider.

  By fall, he already had another residence in mind. Graceland would always symbolize his hopes for a happy life, but he wanted a new home that would nurture a more intimate family atmosphere. Around the same time that Vernon auctioned off equipment at the Circle G Ranch, Elvis and Priscilla bought their first Beverly Hills home, a smaller, four-bedroom house at 1174 Hillcrest Road in Trousdale Estates. Only Charlie Hodge and Patsy and Gee Gee Gambill would live with them there. They finalized the sale in November. Elvis said he liked it because it gave them so much privacy.

  Then in December, the seventh month of Priscilla’s pregnancy, he dropped a bomb on her in asking for a trial separation. She was floored. She’d been determined to keep up with him, never once shying away from a snowball fight or a hayride or whatever physical activity he fancied. They’d had their fights, but nothing that severe, she thought. He gave her no explanation, but she wondered if he were afraid of his public image as a husband and father.

  “I said fine, and stormed out of the room. But he never left, nor asked me to leave, and never mentioned it again. I was relieved, but things were never quite the same after that.”

  Susan Henning played the symbolic “Virgin” to Elvis’s itinerant “Guitar Man” in his 1968 Comeback Special. Off the set, she helped him get over his Madonna complex. (Robin Rosaaen Collection)

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  A Baby, a Babe, and Black Leather

  On the morning of February 1, 1968, Priscilla’s water broke. She and Elvis were at Graceland, and he was still asleep. Priscilla managed to rouse him, and she hurried with her hair and makeup while Elvis rallied Jerry and his wife, Sandy, in the annex. Jerry would drive Elvis and Priscilla to the hospital while Charlie rode shotgun.

  “Hey, don’t get yourself all excited,” Elvis said over the intercom. “But meet me in the kitchen. Priscilla’s ready to go to the hospital.”

  By the time the Schillings came inside, Charlie and Minnie Mae were up, and everyone nervously buzzed around. Everyone except Elvis.

  “Where’s that box of cigars I bought?” Elvis calmly asked. No one seemed to know, but he wasn’t leaving without the Roi-Tans.

  “Who cares about the cigars?” Priscilla asked.

  “I do. I need to pass out cigars at the hospital.”

  Priscilla would remember that her husband seemed to be moving in slow motion—finally finding the cigars, and then stopping in the kitchen to fix a bite to eat. Meanwhile, Priscilla was crossing her legs.

  Jerry knew that it was just a front, that Elvis was more nervous than he had been at any other time in his life. But his way of dealing with it was to slow himself down and act as if absolutely nothing was the matter.

  Now Elvis and Jerry went over the plan again. They’d rehearsed it repeatedly. They’d even made several trial runs to Methodist Hospital, timing the trip, and checking out alternative routes in case there was a problem.

  “Elvis—HURRY UP!” Priscilla yelled.

  She was out in the front drive trying to get in the Lincoln. Elvis could tell she was panicked now. The color went out of his face as he and Jerry and Charlie rushed out the door and got Priscilla comfortable in the backseat. Then they took off down the winding drive.

  When they drove through the Graceland gates, the press gave chase. Elvis was amused. But Priscilla looked puzzled.

  “Are we headed in the direction of Baptist Hospital? If not, I’m having the baby in this car.”

  Charlie spoke up.

  “It’s the wrong hospital.”

  Jerry ignored him. He knew the plan.

  Then Elvis meekly said, “It’s the wrong hospital, Jerry. I forgot to tell you—we switched it over to Baptist.”

  “Oh, no,” Priscilla said softly, her voice tense and strained. “Hurry!”

  Jerry was perspiring as he changed course, praying the backseat wouldn’t soon become a delivery room.

  When they got there, the nurses took Priscilla down the hall, and Elvis, Charlie, and Jerry went to a special waiting room the hospital had reserved for them. Soon, Vernon and Minnie Mae arrived, and then as the day wore on, some of the other guys showed up, including Joe, who flew in from California.

  By early afternoon, Elvis, “hot-wired with nervous energy,” as Jerry remembered, could no longer contain himself. He bounced around the little room until Minnie Mae couldn’t take it anymore.

  “Calm down!” the old lady told him. “You’re not having the baby. She is!”

  Finally, at 5:01 P.M., Elvis became a father. He left to go see his child, and when he came back, his face was one big smile. He led everyone to the nursery to proudly point out the newest Presley, Lisa Marie.

  “I’ve never seen Elvis that ecstatic,” Patsy later said. “He was in heaven. He became an extremely conscientious and protective dad. Maybe even overprotective. He adored that child.”

  A few days later, Jerry brought Elvis, Priscilla, and Lisa Marie home from the hospital. The Beaulieus were there, standing with Vernon and Minnie Mae to greet them as they came in the door. As Jerry watched Elvis hold his daughter, “I got the feeling that whatever he’d been searching for in his spiritual explorations, he had finally found a piece of, right there in his arms.”

  Elvis had been seeking a replication all his life, and Lisa Marie looked as if he had just spit her out. She had his own hooded eyes and a full head of Gladys’s dark black hair. “He was thrilled to no end when he had a daughter,” Joe says. “He loved kids. He talked baby talk and played with my daughters, and he was just happy to be a father, because his mother raised him to be family oriented. It fulfilled a dream.”

  On Valentine’s Day, Elvis and Priscilla took the baby to visit Gladys’s grave. They left a wreath of flowers with a card from “Elvis—Priscilla—Lisa Marie,” and instructions for the card to be burned with the flowers when they wilted.

  He was thirty-three years old, in the prime of his life, at the start of what would prove to be a monumental year. Lisa Marie’s birth had him thinking more intently about the circle of life and death, and about the spirit, so indomitable and mysterious. Five days after Lisa Marie entered the world, Elvis’s old friend Nick Adams left it—a suicide, over a woman. When they found him, he was braced against the wall with his eyes wide open, staring at the face of death. The last time Elvis saw him, Nick had visited him on the set of Girl Happy.

  For more than a year, Colonel Parker had been thinking of ways to redraw his great plan. Elvis’s films now grossed a fraction of the big dollars of the early 1960s, and it was clear that his client was unhappy and despondent about his career. Parker had tried, and failed, to find projects to jolt him from his artistic apathy. With Easy Come, Easy Go, Parker asked Hal Wallis to frame Elvis in a nonmusical role, and the producer had refused. And as late as March 1967, the Colonel sent a memo to MGM, nudging the studio to come up with something inspired for the remainder of Elvis’s contract. Whatever it was, it should not include bikinis or nightclub scenes, “which have been in the last fifteen pictures. . . . I sincerely hope that you are looking in some crystal ball with your people to come up with some good, strong, rugged s
tories.”

  Now the Colonel returned to an old idea. In 1965 he had begun talks with Tom Sarnoff, vice president of NBC’s West Coast division. Parker offered Elvis for a motion picture for television, and Sarnoff liked the idea, but the Colonel wanted world rights to release the movie theatrically after only one airing. The negotiations were long and exasperating, Sarnoff felt, and finally sputtered and stalled.

  In October 1967 Sarnoff met with the Colonel again. This time they began negotiating a package deal to include Elvis’s first TV appearance since the Frank Sinatra “Welcome Home, Elvis” special of 1960. On January 12, 1968, they came to terms: $250,000 for a music special, and $850,000 for a feature film (Change of Habit), plus 50 percent of the profits, bettering Parker’s million-dollar marker.

  Sarnoff had a vision for the music special, one that would let Elvis stretch out in his first full-length performance since the U.S.S. Arizona concert of 1961. However, the Colonel had his own idea about what the special should be. For now, the two men just agreed that it would tape in June 1968 and air in December, sometime around Christmas.

  First Elvis would make Live a Little, Love a Little for MGM that March. The studio brass had paid heed to the Colonel’s memo. The film was not precisely the “good, strong, rugged” story Parker requested, but it freshened Elvis’s image. He played Greg Nolan, a photographer who shoots for both a girlie magazine and a classy advertising agency. Screenwriters Michael A. Hoey and Dan Greenburg adapted Greenburg’s comic novel, Kiss My Firm But Pliant Lips.

  In the era of free love, the writers offered Elvis a more realistic approach to sex, but only to a point. Greg and his kooky model girlfriend (Michelle Carey) share a playful shower scene, and they’re even shown in bed together. But the audience knows it’s all innocent fun—she’s on the other side of the shower door, and a bed divider keeps them apart.