Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  “There were a good five or six times that he got so fucked up that he almost died,” Lamar remembers. Usually it was from the sleeping pills. Then he had the opposite problem at a Howard Johnson Motel somewhere on the road. “He was so wired that Nick had to go in through his neck and shoot him to knock him out.”

  In Lamar’s view, if it hadn’t been for Linda and the group, Elvis would have died three years earlier. He constantly had to be rescued from choking on his food—drugs numb the nerves in the throat that control the swallowing reflex—and one time Linda rushed to call Joe when Elvis turned blue with a peach pit stuck in his throat. Being with him was “like being in a firehouse,” Lamar says. “You never knew when the alarm was going to go off.”

  During that Vegas engagement, Elvis became better acquainted with twenty-three-year-old Ann Pennington, a model-actress and future Playboy Playmate who lived in L.A. Her older sister, Janice, was one of the girls on The Price Is Right, a game show that Elvis often watched with Linda in the hospital. He’d met both of the Penningtons earlier that fall at the Hillcrest house. They shared the same Beverly Hills dentist, Max Shapiro, who telephoned Ann and said Elvis was going through a rough patch after his divorce and needed to meet some nice girls. Would they see him? Ann was more of a Beatles fan, and begged off, but Janice had always liked his music, and though engaged, went to the house one evening. The next day she called her sister and said Ann had to meet him, that Elvis was “the most amazing, kind, sweet southern gentleman.”

  When Ann finally went over, Joe opened the door and she saw Elvis sitting directly in front of her on the couch in a green leisure suit. “He looked, and he got up, and all of a sudden, I went, ‘Oh, Geez. Wow!’ He was just charming and lovely, and we had a great time.”

  The beautiful blonde had a three-year-old daughter, Jessica, but Elvis was already interested in her by the time he found out she was a mother. When he did, “He was like, ‘Oh, my God!,’ and he told me about his block.” The first time he heard her call her daughter “Jessie,” he said, “That’s my twin’s name.” Soon he was comfortable enough with the situation that they bathed Jessie and Lisa together in the tub, and he played with Ann’s daughter and spoiled her with candy just the way he did his own child. Then when they finally got around to intimacy, and he saw that “Annie Pie,” as he affectionately nicknamed her, still excited him, he was able to push his phobia from his mind.

  From the beginning he found the soulful Ann, with her big, expressive eyes, easy to be around, and he could level with her. “I’m so lonely, Annie,” he would say, and sit on the bed and play “Blue Spanish Eyes” for her on his guitar. She knew about loneliness. She’d recently moved to L.A. from San Diego and didn’t know many people other than her sister. And so she was eager to listen to all his old escapades, brag on his karate technique, and appreciate the Charles Boyer album he was currently obsessed with, particularly the Frenchman’s heavily accented recitation of “Where Does Love Go (When It Leaves the Heart).”

  It was a question he asked himself over and over. When Anita called to let him know about her father’s death, he talked so “slow and draggy and not like his effervescent self, the way I remembered him.” But he said, “Little, get a pen and paper. I want you to write this poem down. Verbatim. Take a deep breath.” She did what he said, right down to the inhale. “Now read it back to me, Little,” he said. “Don’t ever forget it.”

  There, with Ann, he did virtually the same thing. “Listen to this, Annie Pie,” he’d say to her. “Aren’t these just the most romantic words you’ve ever heard?”

  “There was an awful lot of feeling there,” she says of the relationship. “My experience with him was nothing but fun and sweetness.” They read his books, and she introduced him to one he loved called Lessons in Truth that her mother had given her when she was a teenager. They just had such great conversations, and while she saw “the drug thing” on a couple of occasions, it didn’t dominate their time together.

  One night in Vegas, when they were sitting around on bar stools with all the guys, Elvis brought out a joint. It was Ann’s first time to smoke grass, “and we got laughing, laughing, laughing, laughing,” and he said something and he grabbed her, and they fell off the chairs and laughed some more.

  But another night, he’d had a couple of drinks, which Ann realized was a rarity for him, and she woke up in the middle of the night freezing in her negligee. Suddenly, she realized she was soaked, but she just moved over to the edge of the bed and stayed there.

  “When he got up, he was mortified. He said, ‘Oh, my God, Annie Pie, Annie Pie, oh, my God, I’m so sorry. Why didn’t you wake me?’ Then we were sitting out with the guys, and he said, ‘I peed all over the bed. Do you believe it? Poor thing! She was huddled in a little corner there. She didn’t say a word.’ ” He didn’t seem embarrassed to talk about it, but after the maids came up and carried the mattress out of the suite, nobody said anything else about it.

  When Linda found out about Ann, she didn’t think that he was really with her, but still, “I felt it was a violation of our relationship, and certainly something he wouldn’t have tolerated.” She’d had an inkling he was with other people now and then: Sherry Williams, for example, came along to Palm Springs with the group, and then when Linda was away with a girlfriend, Sherry spent a week at Graceland. “I wondered, ‘What’s this all about?’ I didn’t realize that Elvis was seeing other women when he was with Linda.” But mostly Elvis just wanted company. “We did a lot of things, theater, karate, shopping. . . . Basically, I think he wanted someone to stay with him while she was gone. However, it was one of the more intimate times I had with him.”

  Then there was a dalliance with Nanette Kuklish, a broadcast newswoman who went to Vegas “on a mission to meet Elvis Presley, and I wasn’t going to give up.” He came on to her twice, the second time in Linda’s presence: “She was sitting right next to him. His head was turned in my direction as we were talking, flirting, and laughing . . . we saw each other a week later at his home in Holmby Hills.”

  “Elvis wanted to be happy,” Marty saw. “He just didn’t know how to do it. He felt it was too late for him to find happiness. He could have found it with Linda. But instead of concentrating on that, he looked back at Priscilla and thought, ‘Maybe I’m not cut out to be married.’ ”

  For Linda, it was past disillusioning, as the two had been together “literally twenty-four hours a day for the first year that we were together,” and within two weeks of meeting her, Elvis told her he was in love and wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. But as she grew and matured, she also became more aware of her own needs, and what Elvis could and could not give her.

  “I think the timing was bad,” Linda assesses. “Not to take away from the magnitude of it, but I was young and he was just coming out of a marriage. It was a transitional kind of relationship, even though it lasted well beyond the transitional years. We planned to be married, and then the time just kind of passed us.”

  Jo Smith remembers how crazy Elvis had been about Linda: “She had a peach-colored outfit, and when she wore it, he would bite at her. He would be talking, and as she passed by, he’d go, ‘And so and so . . . gnaw-gnaw-gnaw-hhhhnnnnhhhhh.’ Like a shark or something.”

  But what started out as marathon lovemaking sessions in Las Vegas dwindled down to “once a year” sex and lifesaving heroics.

  It wasn’t so much that he was truly impotent, though there were times when the drugs rendered him so. “We discussed sexual things,” Dr. Nick reports, “and I think more than anything else he got preoccupied with having more of a mother figure around him to take care of him. I don’t think it was because he couldn’t perform. I just think that’s what he was interested in.”

  And so he continued to hit on other girls right in front of Linda, including twenty-one-year-old Sheila Ryan, who arrived in Vegas at roughly the same time as Ann Pennington. Joe, who thought Sheila was gorgeous and had tried to date her himself as h
is marriage was ending, brought her backstage in early 1974. Elvis saw her across the room and, trying to figure out an excuse to approach her, threw a grape at her so he could come over and apologize without Linda being suspicious. He hit her right between the eyes, smack in the forehead.

  “I had grape juice running down my face. He flung it from about fifteen feet away, and I mean, it was an amazing shot! I thought it had to be a mistake, because nobody would do that. But Joe was laughing, and Elvis was laughing, kneeling down and saying, ‘Oh, I’m sorry’ over and over, and Linda was so nervous in her yellow jersey dress that it turned a different color from under her arm down to her waist.”

  When Elvis looked up at her, Sheila finally realized that Elvis had actually thrown the grape on purpose, so she wasn’t surprised when Joe was on the phone, having dialed her every few minutes for two days while she was changing apartments: “Where in the heck have you been? My boss likes you and wants to see you.”

  She was so angelic-looking, she could have passed for a fourteen-year-old. And though she’d been on the cover of Playboy magazine just that previous October, she was a virgin, a Catholic girl from the burbs of Chicago, Franklin Park. For some reason she couldn’t quite figure out—she had self-esteem issues, as well as what would later be diagnosed as Asperger syndrome—men flocked at her feet. She’d left home fleeing from a crazy boyfriend, intending to go to L.A. But she got only as far as Las Vegas in her worn-out Volvo and wasn’t sure what was next.

  Sheila was thinking about all that as she rode up the elevator to Elvis’s suite between shows. He gave her a hug, and “he was dripping wet with sweat, and he had a white towel, and the towel was dripping wet, and he had no qualms about just sweating all over me.”

  Immediately, he made a little dig about the fact that she was wearing slacks, but they were the best things she owned. To Sheila, who would be Elvis’s only hippie girlfriend, slacks meant dressing up—normally she wore jeans with holes in them—and now she felt sheepish. “They’re Sir For Her,” she said defensively, meaning they were a good brand.

  “Why do you dress like a man?” he continued. She looked at his stage outfit, which reminded her of a Dalmatian, and then she gave it right back to him.

  “Does Cruella know you have her cape tonight?”

  He let out a hearty laugh. He liked it that she was capable of such quick and funny repartee, and he admired her spunk. But she could see he was even more nervous than she was, and that a girl in a pair of slacks, with her hair stuck flat to her head, wasn’t going to do it for him.

  Still, she got in a snit when he ordered her to put on some eyeliner. And when he said, “Your bathroom is over there,” she thought, “Oh, it’s my bathroom, is it?” She was just a little bit miffed, but in a fun sort of way, and as she made her beeline, she flipped him off, but in the front so he couldn’t see.

  “And don’t sass me, either,” he called out. Sheila shook her head. How did he do that?

  In the bathroom, she rummaged around and did the best she could with the little makeup she had in her bag, and when she reappeared, he stunned her. “Do you believe in love at first sight?” he asked.

  Sheila was certainly attracted to him, but she didn’t know whether it was love, and she wouldn’t decide for seven months. She would be his last significant girlfriend. But at that point, all she knew for certain was that Elvis had made it clear how he felt. And that “once you are on the other side of that black velvet curtain, life is never the same.”

  They ate dinner in the bedroom after the second show, and then he moved near the platform bed and sat cross-legged on the floor. People always threw all kinds of odd things on the stage to him, and this night, he brought back a baby’s bib, a plastic fireman’s hat, and a necklace with a cross on it made of gold twigs, with the initials EP and a star set into the bars of the cross.

  Since he hated being called “The King,” he gave her the necklace. Then he put on the fireman’s hat and asked Sheila to tie the bib around his neck. To her astonishment, he began to speak in a tiny voice.

  “I’m Elvis! I’m Elvis Presley! I’m a baby! This is my bib! Sit here by me!”

  She could tell that he wasn’t just goofing around, that he really wanted to be a baby, and he wanted his mother.

  “I thought, ‘Oh, boy. We have problems here.’ And I knew I had to make a decision right then and there. She thought for a minute: ‘Can I do this?’ And the answer was, ‘Damn right I can.’ ”

  They spent most of the night together, and while it never got anything close to being sexual, it was romantic. He sang to her on the balcony, and he was very kissy—very, very kissy, she thought—and they had a lot of fun just rolling around with their clothes on. Later she was relieved he wasn’t the sort of cuddler you have to push off of you all night long.

  She let him fall asleep, and then around 5 A.M., she got up and went back to her apartment. Six hours later, Joe was on the phone. “Goddamn it, where are you? The boss is furious!” She realized then that she was expected to stay the night, and when she got back to the hotel, she assumed Elvis would be thrilled to see her. Instead, he was mad. He was sitting at the breakfast table, and his leg was doing a Saint Vitus’s dance.

  “He said nothing, and I was perplexed. He said, ‘Follow me,’ and I did, like a little geisha. We went in the next room, and he pulled out a hypodermic needle, filled it with Demerol, flicked it three times so there were no air bubbles in it, and handed it to me.” Then he put his thumb into the elastic waistband of his pajamas and pulled it down just far enough.

  “Have you ever done this before?”

  “Uh-huh.” She’d been a nurse’s aide, so she wasn’t unfamiliar, and she gave him the injection.

  “I said, ‘How was it?’ and he said it was okay, but I knew it had to be better than what he got from whoever else was injecting him, because his whole bottom was bruised with contusions, and hard, with scar tissue. You couldn’t really penetrate the skin.”

  She didn’t blame him for wanting it. “Demerol is a great way to start the day when you’re around what he was around.”

  But there, on the continuation of their first date, Sheila had an epiphany: “I knew that I had been sent there for the downfall. I have always been a believer, and I’ve always known that there is a Higher Power. I knew that Priscilla met him to marry him. And Linda met him for the girls’ time, and I met him for the downfall. That’s what I felt my job was, and I accepted it. I never thought that I would fall in love with him. I just loved him and wanted to take care of him.”

  He wanted to take care of her, too, but first he had to put his mark on her. When the shot worked its magic, he had Joe order up a fashion show from Suzy Creamcheese, who brought over racks and racks of dresses. “When you walk through that showroom,” he told Sheila, “I want everybody’s eyes on you. I want everybody to know you’re mine. I don’t want to know that you even existed before this moment. You were born just for me.”

  When they finally made love, she was afraid. She’d tried it once with her last boyfriend, and she was too dry, and he couldn’t enter her. And then there was all that guilt tied in with her religion, so it was emotional and confusing. She’d never heard of a man who preferred pumping to actual sex (“In the Catholic faith, he’d get warts on his hand”), but Elvis was thinking of her benefit. So she wouldn’t get pregnant, “he pulled out and finished himself off and put it all over my belly.

  “The first thing that crossed my mind was, ‘Oh, my God, he’s perverted.’ Because I was just so naïve. My second thought was that I wasn’t enough woman, that my vagina must have been the size of the Grand Canyon, and that he was bouncing off my insides, so he had to hold on to himself. I thought he was so much more sophisticated, so it had to be me.”

  Eventually, Dr. Nick advised her to go on birth control. Yet sometimes she and Elvis just wrestled on the bed and had pillow fights, or he’d tell her stories, like the time he dry humped a famous British pop star in her panty hos
e and rubbed himself raw. But when they did become more intimate, it was a familiar ritual.

  “He did this little dance. It was the, ‘We’re going to do it dance,’ his little mating call. He was uncomfortable with the beginning of it, so he’d walk on one side of the bed. As soon as he had a certain look on his face, he would turn away, and scratch his head, make sure the lights were right, and then pull off one of his shoes and then one of mine, and talk about the weather for five or six minutes. At the time, I thought it was just adorable, because I knew what was coming, so I would get a little wet.”

  Despite all the women he’d been with, she was surprised that he was still shy at certain aspects of lovemaking, though he liked giving oral sex.

  “He would start at my ankles, and then go up, and once he had his head in my muff, with his hands reaching up to my breasts, all of his shyness went right out the window. He made jokes, and he would come up and look me straight in the eyes.”

  Because she was inexperienced, at first she wasn’t sure if she really had an orgasm. Elvis was a tender lover, but she couldn’t relax enough, she thought.

  To help her through it, Elvis said an Indian wise man had told him that there was one way to find out for certain if a man had satisfied his woman.

  “He said that if the lips on her face were cool, she’d had an orgasm, because all of the blood had rushed to her vagina. Once I was familiar with the story, he would make references to it. And then when I would be making the appropriate noises and sounds of ecstasy, he’d say, ‘Okay, I’ll see if I took care of my baby.’ ”

  She didn’t want to disappoint him, so “a couple times, I was quick to wet my lips and breathe in. I didn’t want him to think he hadn’t done the job. Then one time I was getting ready to wet my lips, and before I knew it, I was in full-blown orgasm. I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ And he laughed so hard.”