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Baby, Let's Play House

Page 73

by Alanna Nash


  With Sheila, he rarely asked for oral sex in return. Generally, he thought that’s what prostitutes were for, not girlfriends, though Sheila thought it had to do with the fact that he wasn’t circumcised. “He didn’t seem to want it. He was a giver and it didn’t stop at giving cars and jewelry—even sexually, he was a giver.”

  They were good together, at least for a while, and Elvis seemed completely under her spell, bemused by her crooked smile and what he called her “bubble butt.”

  However, their sexual appetites didn’t always match. She understood his rules, that “I was never to be a first-thing-in-the-morning kind of girl,” and that “there couldn’t be a natural odor to me anywhere.” But she hadn’t counted on the sleeping pills. One morning, she had douched, showered, powdered, puffed, dressed, and prettied to his expectations, and now it was Sheila who did the mating dance. First, she tickled his nose with a feather, but she watched in frustration as it rose and fell to the breath of slumber. Next, she took all his rings from the bedside table, put them on her own fingers and made tapping sounds, sitting right next to him on the bed.

  “I didn’t want to get in trouble, but I wanted to play. I wanted to make love, and I really wanted him in me. But he didn’t wake up, and I was sitting there, sitting there, and sitting there.”

  In his conscious moments, Elvis appreciated Sheila most of all because she made him laugh, and he found her naïveté fresh and disarming. He liked to roll her middle name, “Marie,” together with her first, so it came out as a mush of sound—“Sheila M’ree”—but he also had several nicknames for her based on her haircut. One was “Dennis,” for “Dennis, the Menace,” and the second was “Chicken Head.” The latter was reminiscent of what he’d said to actress Goldie Hawn when he met her while taping the ’68 special: “He walked up to me and he tousled my hair and he said, ‘You look like a chicken that’s just been hatched.’ ” Shirley Dieu understood that the concept of an intelligent girl who acted like a ditz was a turn-on for him.

  “That’s how Sheila was, like Goldie Hawn. She had that same dumb blond personality. Priscilla asked me one time, ‘What is it that Elvis sees in Sheila? She’s not his type.’ But she would just say the stupidest things. For example, if Elvis would walk in the room and everybody would be really quiet, Sheila would be like, ‘What? Why is everybody quiet?’ And then laugh. She just was oblivious to it all, and she would think out loud when she talked, like, ‘Uh, I don’t know . . . uh . . .’ It was cute, and just really funny. And that’s what made her entertaining.”

  One person who wasn’t entertained was Linda Thompson. After Sheila had been alone in Vegas with Elvis for eight days, Linda found out about it, and as Shirley remembers, “Linda was so jealous of her that she had us all convinced that Sheila was a hooker. She told everybody that Joe had picked her up, and after he had paid for her, she wanted to be with Elvis.” Shirley actually believed it for a while and then learned better.

  Elvis and Linda had a terrific row over Sheila on the phone during Sheila’s first stay, and it opened Sheila’s eyes to both the volatility and the importance of his relationship with her.

  “I heard a tone coming out of him that was so guttural that I thought, ‘He must be fighting with Priscilla.’ I was in the bathroom and I stayed there, because I didn’t even want to believe that there was someone in his life who could make him this angry. She was just letting him have it, and he was explaining to her when he would be home and when she could come see him again, and it was very, very disturbing. He was saying, ‘You’ve always gotta do it, don’t you? You’ve always gotta twist the knife so that my gut can’t even breathe.’ He just got vehement. And that’s when I came to find out that Linda, who he let on was ‘just a girl,’ was very much a part of his life. That was a rude awakening for me.”

  What puzzled Linda the most was how paradoxical Elvis was in terms of romance. On the one hand, she knew that he loved her immeasurably and that he was devoted to her emotionally. He took the time to articulate his feelings, saying, “I know that I haven’t been completely faithful to you. I know that you don’t understand a lot of the things that I do. But you have to know that you could never be with anyone who would love you more.”

  And so they would remain in each other’s lives. But there would continue to be plenty of competition. Not only would Linda and Sheila pass each other on the moving sidewalk in the Las Vegas airport at one point, but when Sheila went on tour with him in March 1974, Elvis had Marty pick up Ann Pennington in Monroe, Louisiana, while someone else took the departing Sheila to the plane. For Ann, “I had a little ‘ouch’ about it, but it was like, ‘That’s the way it is.’ ”

  After March, Sheila didn’t hear from him for months, understanding that she and Linda were “sort of running a horse race . . . we were neck and neck and then I fell behind.” And so she moved to Los Angeles and made no effort to get in touch with him. During the interim, Elvis reconciled with Linda, threw a twenty-third birthday party for her in May, and let her redecorate Graceland in a brilliant red color scheme, replacing the original blue.

  Linda was the woman who best met his tricky combination of requirements—sexy, yet motherly, gentle but feisty, and perhaps most important, spiritual. Still, Elvis thought he hadn’t found exactly what he was looking for, and one night that spring, he took Larry Geller aside at the Monovale house. “I’ve got to meet someone, man. You know a lot of women. Fix me up.”

  To Larry, it was preposterous. Elvis was the biggest sex symbol there was.

  “I don’t know, Elvis,” Larry said.

  But then he thought of Michelle Meyers, who booked rock groups for all of the clubs and knew every girl in town. Larry dialed the phone. “Oh, I know this girl, and she’d be great,” Michelle told him. That evening, Elvis sent one of the guys to pick her up and bring her to the house for a party. But when she came in the door, Elvis turned sharply to his friend.

  “His eyes popped open, and it was like, ‘What in the hell did you do to me?’ ”

  She was disabled and hobbled in on a cane.

  Elvis treated her as he did all the rest of the women there that night (“Honey, would you like some food?”), and she settled in with the group. But when the conversation grew dull, Elvis turned to Larry’s younger sister, Judy, a live wire who had come up to the house a number of times. At five foot six and 120 pounds, Judy was tall and thin, with long, dark hair and green eyes, and Elvis had always liked her. He’d also met her twin, Elaine, some years back when Larry brought her on one of the movie sets.

  “Elvis was sitting on the couch with beautiful women on each side of him, but they were posed like mannequins—they were afraid to talk to him,” Judy remembers. In contrast, and just to breathe some air into the room, she peppered him with questions: “Elvis, how did you get your black belt?”

  The night wore on, and about 1:30 A.M., Larry suggested it was time to go. Judy walked over to Elvis, still on the couch and surrounded by women, and kissed him briefly on the lips. “Nice seeing you,” she said. She was almost out the door when he yelled out, “Hey, I never kissed you before!” Judy shot him a flirty glance.

  “It wasn’t so bad,” she purred.

  “That’s all he had to hear. He got up, grabbed my arm, walked me out to the car, took my purse off my hand, and started French kissing me in the car.”

  “Oh, my God!” Larry thought. “My sister with Elvis!” He hurried away with a quick good-bye.

  Now Elvis looked Judy square in the face. “Will you stay?”

  “Absolutely not,” she said. “You’re with another woman.”

  “Will you come back again tomorrow night? I won’t be then.”

  “I’d love to,” she said. But down deep, “I was scared out of my mind. Out of my mind! I took a Valium to go to his house.”

  She was so frightened, in fact, that Larry had to drive her, steering the car up to the gates and through all of the screaming girls who taunted, “You can’t get in! You won’t get in!


  Inside, Lisa Marie did cartwheels and handstands to entertain her father’s guests. After a quick hello all around, Judy sat next to Elvis on the couch, while Larry and a few of the guys filled the rest of the chairs in the den. Larry was even more nervous than his sister, and finally blurted, “I can’t take this! I have to go!” Soon, everyone else left, too, and then it was just Judy and Elvis watching television. After a while, Elvis said, “Come on. Let’s go upstairs.”

  His bed, big and round, sat in a curved wall of mirrors, “so that wherever you looked, you’d see Elvis.” Judy stared at the ornate chamber of seduction, felt her heart jump, and almost lost her nerve. “I was thinking, ‘I can’t believe this! It was stunning.’ ” But it paled in comparison to the sight of Elvis emerging from the bathroom in navy blue pajamas piped in powder blue. “He really was to die for. I couldn’t even look at him. I thought, ‘I’m with Jesus Christ.’ That’s how powerful he was, like nothing you have ever seen before. He was so hot it was scary.”

  The elegant pajamas never came off, but it didn’t matter. He and Judy spent the whole night hugging and kissing, doing everything and nothing. The high point came when, “He laid on top of me, held my face in his hands, looked into my eyes, and said, ‘I love your mouth.’

  “I can’t believe I didn’t pass out.”

  But Elvis soon did. Around 3 A.M., he asked if she minded going downstairs and getting his dinner. The cook had left it in the refrigerator, he said. “You’ll know what it is when you see it.”

  Judy made her way to the kitchen, fixed his plate, gathered the silverware, and brought it all upstairs, only to find him lost to the world. “I said, ‘Elvis . . . Elvis?’ I thought he was dead. I didn’t know. I was scared. I took my finger and pushed on his eye to see if I could get a reflex. I didn’t see him take anything, but whatever he took hit him hard.”

  She stayed with him, not really knowing what to do, and after a while, he got up, ate a little, and then fell back to sleep, not waking again until 8 A.M.

  “Will you spend the night with me?” he asked, meaning the rest of the day. But Judy had had enough. “At that point, I was so freaked out, I said, ‘You know what? I think I should go.’ ” Elvis looked disappointed, but called for one of his stepbrothers. “Open the gates,” he said through muzzy speech, “and make sure she gets out okay.”

  His appetites continued to run more to the cosmic than the carnal. In late August 1974, he was back in Vegas, and on September 3, he took in Tom Jones’s performance at Caesars Palace, climbing up onstage with the Welsh star who had been his friend since the 1960s and singing “American Trilogy.”

  Afterward, actress and beauty pageant winner Susan Anton was invited back, where Elvis started showing her his karate technique. Soon he suggested they take the party over to his suite. The two of them sat talking on the couch for a while, and then he said, “Come with me. I have something to show you.”

  “I thought, ‘Uh-oh, here it is. This is the move.’ He took me down the hallway to his personal room and motioned for me to sit in a chair. And then he sat on a footstool in front of me and began reading from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet.” Even though Elvis was an icon, Susan could see “he was just a sweet country boy under all that. It was like talking to a big brother.”

  Whether Susan realized it or not, Sheila was with him that night. By August, when she still hadn’t heard from him, she phoned him in Vegas, and he invited her to fly over when Linda, who attended opening night, went home. He’d garnered terrific reviews, the Hollywood Reporter calling it “the best show . . . in at least three years. Presley looks great, is singing better than he has in years, and was so comfortable with his show—almost all new songs—the packed Hilton showroom gave him several standing ovations.”

  But on September 2, his closing night, when Sheila, Priscilla, and Lisa Marie were in attendance, he delivered two long stream-of-consciousness monologues in which he seemed compelled to explain the recent events of his life. He was just coming out of Marty Robbins’s song, “You Gave Me a Mountain,” and started by saying the song had nothing to do with him or his ex-wife.

  “She’s right here,” he said of Priscilla. “Honey, stand up. [Applause] Come out, honey. Come out, come on out. Turn around, let them see you. [More applause] Boy, she’s . . . she’s a beautiful chick. I’ll tell you sure, boy. Boy, I knows ’em when I picks ’em. You know? Goddamn.

  “And then at the same booth is my girlfriend, Sheila. Stand up, Sheila. [Applause] Turn around, turn around, completely around. Sheila, hold it up. Hold it up. Hold the ring up. Hold up the ring. The ring. Your right hand. Look at that son of a bitch.”

  Priscilla sank deep into the booth as Elvis began discussing the reasons for the divorce, the $2 million settlement, and Mike Stone, purposely confusing the words stud and Stutz, referencing the car. “Mike Stone ain’t no stud, so forget it,” he said. “I wish [Mike] was a stud, you know. He’s a . . . nice guy.”

  He went on to sing “Softly as I Leave You,” but then later in the evening, he was at it again, this time trotting out the Patricia Parker paternity rumor, saying, “I had a picture made with that chick, and that’s all. And she got pregnant by the camera.”

  The audience responded nervously, mixing tight laughter with applause, and seemed to fear what might come next. Now Elvis wanted to address another rumor, that he had missed shows because he had been “strung out” on drugs. He had the flu, he insisted, his voice growing angrier and more agitated. “If I find or hear an individual that has said that about me,” he ranted, “I’m going to break their goddamn neck, you SON OF A BITCH! [Screams and applause] That is DANGEROUS! I will pull your goddamn tongue out BY THE ROOTS!” And with that, he bizarrely switched gears and calmly segued into “Hawaiian Wedding Song” from Blue Hawaii.

  “I was in shock,” Priscilla said later. “Because [in the past], he would never, ever let on to the audience what his emotions were. . . . This was [so] out of character for someone who had so much pride. Everything that he was against, he was displaying. It was like watching a different person.”

  Sheila was also perplexed. He’d given her the ring just before the performance, “and I was a little frightened, because I thought maybe he was going to ask me to marry him. It was a crystal ring with diamonds set on the top, and it was huge! I was excited by it, and then disappointed when I realized what it was all about. It was so he could introduce me and have Priscilla turn green with envy. When he said, ‘Show them the ring, baby,’ I mean, he made that ring big enough for the entire showroom to see from the balcony.”

  Sheila was confused about all of it, including where she stood in his life. They went to Palm Springs together for five days afterward, and then Elvis went home to Memphis, to Linda, who wasn’t certain about her role, either.

  While he was there, he bought Billy and Jo Smith a 1975 Woodcrest doublewide trailer with three bedrooms, and installed it in back of Graceland. The entourage of old hardly existed anymore—the guys were all getting older now, and they had different priorities and families of their own.

  Out in California, Elvis had called Patti Parry, who was engaged to be married and living in Malibu with her fiancé. “He said, ‘You’ve got to come up here now.’ I said, ‘Elvis, I’m moving.’ He said, ‘No, no, I need a haircut.’ I said, ‘I just cut your hair.’ He said, ‘Please.’ So I left, and when I got up there, he gave me a mink jacket. I said, ‘You’re not losing me. You’ll never lose me.’ He got nervous, because he didn’t have that many friends. Not really.”

  Elvis had added some new guys to help with costumes and security in recent years—Al Strada, karate expert Dave Hebler, and soon he’d bring in Dr. Nick’s son, Dean. His stepbrothers, too, had taken on some of the old responsibilities. But Elvis didn’t feel the loyalty from them that he had from the old gang. And Red, who Sheila considered to be the only real friend Elvis ever had, knew that the Stanleys numbered among Elvis’s drug connections, along with a member of the b
acking group, Voice. When Red found out the singer was supplying Elvis with hard drugs, his famous temper rushed to the fore. “I kicked the door in, I stomped the guy’s foot and broke [it], said, ‘You keep bringing them, I’m just gonna work my way up.’ ” Everybody thought it was a good idea if Billy Smith were just a little closer, to keep an eye on things.

  Elvis had now reached a critical level of drug use. On September 27, 1974, before a show at Cole Field House in College Park, Maryland, Tony Brown, Elvis’s new keyboard man who joined the show that fall as part of Voice, watched in anguish as Elvis fell to his knees getting out of the limousine. (“I don’t even know how we got him on the plane,” Red told Sonny.) His performance that night reflected his woozy state, and fans and reviewers alike expressed dismay.

  In the audience was Barbara Hearn, Elvis’s Memphis girlfriend from 1956. She was living in the Washington, D.C., area with her husband, James Smith, and they attended the show with two other couples.

  “Oh, I was so sad! I had planned to go down and to speak to Mr. Presley, and I would have gone back to say hello to Elvis, too, but after sitting through the show, I didn’t want to. I had wanted my friends to see how special he was, but he was anything but special.”

  Elvis and Diana Goodman depart the hotel for his concert at the Nassau County Veterans Memorial Coliseum, Uniondale, New York, July 19, 1975. Diana, Miss Georgia USA, later enjoyed a short stint on Hee Haw, as Linda Thompson had before her. (Ron Galella)

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Flickering White Light

  In October, Elias Ghanem became increasingly concerned about Elvis’s distended colon and ordered a series of tests. The results were not extraordinary, but Elvis was now traveling with a trunk of Fleet’s enemas, which some of the guys groused about carrying, and his bowels were so unpredictable that he would often sleep with a towel wrapped around his midsection.

 

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