Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  “I don’t know . . . you would have to ask her.”

  “Why have you led such a secluded life?”

  “It’s not secluded, honey, I’m just sneaky.”

  Elvis had gone into the engagement without a serious girlfriend. He had called Celeste Yarnall and made it clear he wanted her to come be with him, be his lady, but she turned him down. She had a brand-new Collie puppy, she said, which was true. But the larger issue was that “I was married still, even though I was separated, and I just knew it would be the wrong decision for me to enter into that lifestyle. I didn’t go to the Hollywood parties, never drank or smoked, went to bed early. Maybe if I had said ‘yes,’ I would have been the Linda Thompson in his life. Who knows?”

  On August 16, 1969, twenty-four-year-old Joyce Bova, a junior member of the Armed Services Committee of the Unites States House of Representatives in Washington, D.C., came to Las Vegas on vacation. With her was a girlfriend, AnnMarie Wade, a huge Elvis fan. AnnMarie couldn’t believe it when Joyce lucked into a pair of comps to his show on their third night, but they were a gift from Paul Anka, who had inadvertently embarrassed her with an offhand comment during his own performance.

  Joyce and AnnMarie were waiting in line for their passes on August 19 when suddenly a greeter from the International plucked them from the line and asked if they’d like to meet Elvis, right then before the second show. It seemed a most peculiar series of events, but Joyce and AnnMarie went with the flow and soon found themselves being led down a maze of hallways and into a room with Vernon Presley and the members of the Memphis Mafia. Everyone was waiting for Elvis.

  Joyce worked with famous people every day, but when he finally walked through the door, “I wasn’t prepared for how beautiful he was. Beautiful. That was the word for it.” Elvis inspired not so much desire in her, she would write in her memoir, Don’t Ask Forever: My Love Affair with Elvis Presley, but “a mixture of curiosity and awe.”

  Elvis responded to her in kind, for Joyce—striking, so petite as to be tiny, with long dark hair and the olive skin of her Sicilian heritage—had the exotic looks that always caught his attention. Joe could see why: “Pretty girl. Black hair, beautiful eyes, and a dancer. Attracted him tremendously. And they just hit it off.”

  He laid his usual flirtatious prattle on her, arranged for her and AnnMarie to sit in his booth, and invited her back after the show.

  Joyce felt almost lightheaded watching him perform, and just then it occurred to her, seeing him with all the shrieking women, that he might be expecting more from her than she was prepared to give. She promised herself she wouldn’t let it get out of hand, but once she was back in his private dressing room, she could feel an intensity from him—the way he gripped her hand, the way he moved too fast. Suddenly, a woman came up and mistook her for Priscilla, an easy thing to do, and she could feel her face flush.

  Things might have ended there, especially as AnnMarie had promised Paul Anka that they would come see him backstage. But then Charlie was standing there with something for her to drink, and Elvis was babbling on about how “unique” she was, because he could just tell. And it was then that Joyce uttered the words that would capture Elvis’s attention forever.

  “Actually, there are two of me,” said the spunky brunette. “I have an identical twin sister.”

  Elvis stared at her with a look of “surprise and shock, but like he was trying to digest it,” Joyce remembered in a rare interview for this book. And then his whole demeanor changed. Gone was the superstar pose and the man on the make. Suddenly Elvis was just someone who’d lost a vital part of himself.

  “My little brother, Jessie Garon, died when I was born,” he told her. “You know, they say the twin who survives lives on carrying the qualities of both, of the one who died.”

  She thought she’d upset him, but as he talked on, she saw that the look was really one of discovery and recognition, that he had met someone who knew what it was like to be a twin. It turned out that Joyce was also the second born, like Elvis, and in an odd way, this was his own personal reunion. Meeting her almost gave him the ability to look and see what might have been, if not for fate. Now he wanted to hear more about her sister.

  Joyce and Janice had been nearly inseparable since birth, she told him. They did everything together, even though Janice had recently married.

  “Do you miss her a lot?” he asked. “I mean, when you’re away from her, like tonight?”

  Joyce told him she’d wished all night that Janice were there to share each amazing moment of her visit. “But, of course, I know she knows how happy I am.”

  Elvis asked her what she meant.

  “Well, it’s hard to explain, but Janice and I have always had this capacity to feel the other’s emotions, no matter how many miles separate us from each other.”

  Now he looked at her for what seemed like a long time, and she got the feeling that “he had many questions he wanted answered.”

  “Joyce,” he said, “would you come up to the suite later and have dinner with me?”

  Oh, wow. Now she was stunned. Her hands turned to jelly. She didn’t know about this. Suddenly she felt as vulnerable as if she were naked. She was afraid. She’d had a strict Catholic upbringing in Baltimore, and her father was a sergeant on the vice squad. Her mother had been a dancer, and because of her own history with show people, she had imposed a “relentlessly repressive regime” on the twins their whole lives. And so Joyce turned Elvis down, saying she and AnnMarie had promised to meet some people.

  He pressed her. “Is this some guy? Y’know, I can tell . . . some guy you maybe just met?”

  She finally told him what was really on her mind, that she figured he picked a different girl each night, and tonight it was she, and that wasn’t what she wanted. “I adore you,” she said, “but no thank you.”

  All he wanted was to get to know her better, he said. “Besides, you ought to realize that it’s not physically possible for me to be with a different girl every night and still do what I do up on that stage.”

  “Well,” she said, though she felt a little sheepish, “there’s also the fact that you’re married.”

  Now he was indignant. “What does ‘married’ have to do with this? I just want to be with someone I can talk to. You should realize that with you I would have to be a perfect gentleman. And that’s a promise.”

  And so she caved, she wrote, “like a freshman congressman confronted by Tip O’Neill.”

  Joyce was too nervous to actually enjoy her cheeseburger dinner with Elvis and the guys in his suite on the twenty-ninth floor of the International, but Elvis was intrigued with her—the fact that she was a twin, that she worked on Capitol Hill, and that her father was a cop. And so he asked her questions almost the entire time until she left at 5 A.M., when he had Gee Gee Gambill take her down and put her in a cab for her room at the Dunes.

  When she returned for a second dinner a few days later, she asked him point-blank, “Why me?” His answer: “Trouble is . . . it’s been a long time since I’ve felt so comfortable with a woman.”

  It made her dizzy. But that couldn’t be true, could it? Elvis Presley? She didn’t know what to think, especially when he asked her to stay in Vegas a few more days.

  “Believe me, I would love to, but the Congress of the United States doesn’t recess for me.” Before she left, he kissed her for the first time and asked for her home phone number. She scribbled it out quickly and put it in his palm, and he replaced it with a small diamond ring, a perfect stone set in finely wrought gold. “So you won’t forget me,” he said.

  A week later, he called her at 2 A.M. He wanted her to come back to see him. Right then. And when he heard her sister was at the door, he seemed delighted. “Put her on,” he said. “I want to meet her.”

  On their first night together, Elvis gave Barbara Leigh a gold medallion of Jesus, shown here on a chain around her neck. Their faith made up part of the bedrock of their relationship. (Courtesy of Barbara Leig
h)

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Girls, Guns, and the President

  In October 1970, Elvis and Priscilla were back in Hawaii again, the Colonel having held Alex Shoofey’s toes to the fire for the perk. Vernon and Dee, the Espositos, the Schillings, and the Gambills all came along at their invitation. Elvis had nothing scheduled until his return to the International stage in January, and while he’d once told Jerry that one of the most important lessons in life was being able to cope without anything to do, he was looking forward to the time off.

  Although there was always much to interest Elvis in Hawaii for either work or play, after his huge fight with Priscilla there, the locale no longer seemed the paradise it once had. He never seemed to go anywhere else on vacation, one of the guys pointed out, and someone suggested that they all just continue their holiday in Europe. The Colonel always had some excuse why Elvis couldn’t perform there, so if he were going to see any more of the Continent than Germany and France, he needed to do it on his free time.

  They made a plan to return to the mainland, where they could pull some strings and expedite passports. But when the Colonel caught wind of the idea, he squelched it immediately, arguing that Elvis’s rabid European fans would be insulted if he visited as a tourist before ever appearing in concert.

  As usual, Elvis relented and accepted Parker’s suggestion to go to the Bahamas for two weeks instead. The Colonel had contacts there, he said, and they’d love the gambling and the deep-sea fishing. But the sea was too choppy for the latter, and the trip was largely a bust: Rain and hurricane winds kept them virtually trapped at the Paradise Island Hotel, where Elvis sat in with an Irish band, the Witnesses, and resumed fighting with Priscilla. The group returned home earlier than expected.

  On October 30 gossip columnist Rona Barrett ran into Elvis at the blackjack tables, a girl on each arm. Her November 6 column carried a most candid item: “Everybody is commenting on how good Elvis Presley looks these days while he’s having fun at the International. . . . Elvis’s answer in response to such compliments: ‘That’s what a bad marriage does for you!’ ”

  In the middle of December, he started calling Joyce Bova again, asking her to come to California. She couldn’t, she told him. Her committee was investigating the My Lai incident. She was putting in twelve-hour days. They went round about it again, and finally he just informed her he was making arrangements for her to come the following day.

  “I can’t . . . Elvis you know I can’t,” she pleaded. “I don’t see why you can’t come here.” He started in, saying maybe she wasn’t interested after all, and she snapped at him, blurting, “Anyway, what about your wife?” They exchanged a few tense words, and then she heard a click.

  When he went back to Vegas for four weeks on January 26, 1970, he was again the talk of the town and drew almost universal acclaim, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner writing, “The new decade will belong to him.” This time, Bill Belew dressed him in one-piece jumpsuits made of stretch gabardine (“I got the idea from a karate suit,” Elvis would say), which gave him freedom of movement. Most were either all black or all white, including a stunning white suit cut to the sternum with a “necklace” of rope at the neck.

  The reviewer for Life magazine, a Columbia University professor named Albert Goldman—later a controversial Presley biographer—took particular note of the costume and the “male cheesecake” who wore it. Though he savaged the outfit as effeminate and indicative of the star’s “immaculate narcissism,” Goldman admitted that “not since Marlene Dietrich stunned the ringsiders with the sight of those legs encased from hip to ankle in a transparent gown has any performer so electrified this jaded town with a personal appearance.”

  He also derided the fan reaction. “Watching the women in the audience lunge toward the stage like salmon up a falls becomes the show’s real comic relief,” he wrote. But Elvis managed “very well with his constituency by occasionally grabbing a blue-haired lady at ringside and kissing her firmly on the mouth.”

  Not all the ladies were blue-haired, by a long shot, and when Elvis returned in August, he would begin the ritual of handing out scarves to the women brave enough to make their way downstage. Charlie would stand behind him like a king’s courtier, feeding what seemed to be an endless supply. Then Elvis would wipe his brow with one, and as the women screamed, shrieked, and elbowed one another for standing room, Elvis would religiously place one in their outstretched hands. It was rock-and-roll communion, Vegas style.

  Everything was coming together now, the return to the stage, the resurgence of fame, and the industry respect. Now it was time to test the waters for touring, to see if the faithful only came to Vegas, or if they were still out there, tucked away in the small towns and walking the streets of the bigger cities.

  At the end of February, he flew to Houston on Kirk Kerkorian’s private jet. There, in his first performances outside Las Vegas since 1961, he played four concerts over two days at the Houston Livestock Show, breaking attendance records by some 10,000. Robert Hilburn, reviewing for the Los Angeles Times, called the first evening performance “masterful.”

  The appearances warranted a press conference, and Elvis said that while the size of the Astrodome was daunting (“It scares the . . . it’s a big place, man”), in a way it felt like a homecoming, because he played so many early dates in the Lone Star state during his Louisiana Hayride days.

  Yet at one point, the shows looked as if they might not happen after all, remembers the Sweet Inspirations’ Myrna Smith. “The promoters didn’t want us to go, because it was in Texas, and at that time, they weren’t as liberal as they are today. They told Elvis not to bring ‘those black girls.’ Elvis replied, ‘Okay, but I’m not coming, either.’ ” Then he went a step further by making a promoter’s daughter drive the Sweets around in a limousine.

  For the second day’s show, Priscilla flew in, just as the Houston papers reported rumors of the breakup of the marriage. Yet she was not the only woman he had seen in Texas lately. Elvis had been flying to Dallas routinely since October 1969, registering in hotels as Jon Burrows, and spending time with a stewardess, and perhaps more than one. Lamar reports that Elvis was making trips to the American Airlines Stewardess College in Fort Worth and trolling for women, just as in his army days.

  If, indeed, one of the world’s most desired men flew around the country looking for girls, it speaks not only to his insatiable need for female companionship—and particularly the companionship of women who all dressed alike, as in twinship—but also to his desire to be the aggressor in relationships, since women had been literally fainting at his feet for decades. Soon he would start sending out for hookers in Vegas, but mostly for the guys, Joe says.

  “We were so jaded by this point that it had become too much trouble to go out and look for women.” They’d switch girls as the night wore on, but according to Joe, only on occasion would Elvis disappear in his room with one, saying he’d rather watch. His preference was almost always two women together. “Elvis romanticized sex. Paying by the hour grounded it all too well.”

  In Houston, reporters asked him if he still planned on making films. “I hope to,” he said, and then laughed. “I’d like to make better films than I made before.” But as far as he knew, there was nothing planned. He then deferred to the Colonel. “Is there anything in the workings?”

  “I can’t commit myself,” the crafty manager dodged. But in exactly one month, Parker closed a half-million-dollar deal with Kerkorian, the new owner of MGM Studios, for Elvis: That’s the Way It Is, a documentary to chronicle his 1970 summer engagement at the International. The Colonel had sought twice that much, as the film would have a theatrical release. But with Oscar-winning director Denis Sanders on board, it was still a prestige project.

  “He loved it,” says Jerry. “He must have seen it ten times.” Elvis was particularly proud because the staging worked. He’d gotten so much opposition from the Colonel about having so many musicians and singers right aro
und him, instead of hiding the band and sticking the singers way off to the side. He wanted it all out front, cocooning him, the way he liked to work in the studio. It was comforting. It was human touch, almost, what he always desired the most.

  When Elvis finished his superstar engagement in Houston, he was off to California to play family man again, spending extended time with Priscilla. Despite the shakiness of the marriage, they went house hunting in Palm Springs, and in early April, they found one to their liking at 845 Chino Canyon, making a $13,000 down payment and signing a mortgage for $85,000.

  Priscilla’s husband seemed to be trying, she thought, but even though he threw her a surprise twenty-fifth birthday party in May, she still felt “I was always a little girl to him.” When it came to selecting furniture for the Palm Springs house, they moved some of what they had in storage. But then Elvis chose the rest, and it was big and masculine and not her style at all.

  At the end of the year, as part of creating her own life, she would pick a new home in Los Angeles as well, spending $339,000 for a more private residence at 144 Monovale Drive, in the Holmby Hills section of Beverly Hills. She decorated it herself with a more feminine touch, while keeping the big couches and modern furniture that pleased her husband. Now that they had Lisa, she felt they had outgrown the Hillcrest house, and on Monovale, there were five bedrooms, with two more bedrooms in the guesthouse—room to stretch out or accommodate the entourage and their spouses.

  She looked back at her former self and could hardly believe how she had lived. “If he said, ‘That’s a terrible color on you,’ I’d change my clothes immediately. For years, I was self-conscious that my neck was too long because Elvis always told me to wear my shirt collars up. Now I realize . . . You know all those pictures where he had his collar up? He was the one who was self-conscious about his neck.”

  That hadn’t really dawned on her when he started with Bill Belew’s Napoleonic collars, but now there was no denying it. As she continued to simplify her look and uncover her natural beauty, Elvis piled on his own plumage and wrapped himself in ever-increasing flamboyance and fantasy costumes. One white outfit was so fringy and bat-winged that when he raised his arms, he appeared to take flight, and he was already thinking jewel-encrusted capes for next year. When the first one arrived, Bill saw, he “was like a child who had gotten a new toy and couldn’t wait to play with it. He would prance and dance around the floor, twirling the cape, and ask the guys, ‘What do you think? How do you like this?’ ” In a way, Elvis was becoming his own skewed vision of the Priscilla he had dolled up and created, taking her from schoolgirl to Dracula’s party queen overnight.