Elvis Presley

by Williamson, Joel

  The Elvisian universe was a thing unto itself, but it still had somehow to find its way among other universes in the broader cultural cosmos of Memphis, Hollywood, New York, the United States, and beyond. It was compelled to respond to outside forces—particularly the army, the movie people, the record people, the television people, the Las Vegas and tour people, and the fans. Colonel Tom Parker mediated these responses very effectively. It was he who created the conditions that allowed Elvis to live as he did. He brought in the money without which there would have been no Elvisian universe, and he promoted and protected the marvelously beautiful images of Elvis that floated in the minds of Elvis’s audiences everywhere—highly marketable commodities. By the Colonel’s rule, Elvis never performed casually and for free. Even shows done ostensibly for charity were carefully calculated to increase Elvis’s revenues. If the Mafia went too far in their hijinks, they would hear the Colonel’s stern voice. If outside forces became too menacing, those forces would feel his power.

  Elvis’s image was precious, but it was vastly distant from the life that Elvis really lived. Lamar Fike sometimes chuckled over how good a job the insiders did in promoting the deception. It was a construct, a deception from which everyone derived “fun” and an income of a magnitude they would have had difficulty achieving elsewhere. Both the Colonel and Elvis established and stringently enforced the rule that no one in Elvis’s private life should ever tell outsiders what it was really like.

  The Colonel himself carefully stayed out of Elvis’s personal affairs. He did not even live in Memphis, but rather in Madison, Tennessee, near Nashville and more than two hundred miles east of Graceland. Only when he feared that Elvis’s public performances might be adversely impacted or his image tarnished did he intervene. For more than twenty years, Elvis was his only client, and altogether he served him well.

  The Girls in Germany

  After Elvis went to Germany, he and Anita Wood, a Memphis friend, talked about her coming over for a visit. She never did, but Elvis wrote to Anita for a year and a half, a uniquely long string of correspondence for him. He loved her as no one else in the whole world, he declared, and always would. He eagerly waited the time when they could marry and have “a little Elvis.” He insisted that she remain “clean and wholesome,” meaning virginal. In one letter he described himself as a “lonely little boy 5000 miles away.” If Elvis was lonely, it was certainly not because he was alone. Almost immediately after he arrived in Germany, he was keeping company with a fifteen-year-old German girl, an aspiring model named Margit Buergin, whom he compared favorably to Brigitte Bardot. With this girl, he wrote one of his friends, it was “Grind City.” Margit became pregnant and had to abort Elvis’s child, an event, she later said, that left a scar on her psyche. Soon, he introduced another fifteen-year-old German girl, Heli Priemel, to his bed. He called her “Legs.”

  In Germany, the girls flocked to Elvis. Important among them was nineteen-year-old Elisabeth Stefaniak, a beautiful German girl whose father had deserted her and her mother during the war. After the war, her mother married an American army sergeant. She lived with her mother, her adoptive father, and a six-year-old half-sister on an army base near the Czech border where Elvis was stationed temporarily in November and December 1958. She sought his autograph at the post theater, and he took to her immediately, inviting her to sit next to him during the movie and putting his arm around her shoulders, an act, with Elvis, of possession. He walked Elisabeth home and behaved in a considerate and gentlemanly manner. On Thanksgiving morning, he knocked on her door unannounced and spent a delightful day with her family. Elvis had found his target, and he was being his charming self.

  Soon he hired Elisabeth to serve as his private secretary, given her command of both German and English. She would live in his household, have her own room, and be one of the family. He assured Elisabeth’s parents that his father and grandmother would watch over her. On the very first night, however, Elvis let Elisabeth know in a matter-of-fact way that her job would be much more than secretarial. One of her duties was to sleep with him—every night when there was no other girl immediately available for his bed. Elvis explained that he would not have full intercourse with her. He did not do that, he said, with any girl “he was going to see on a regular basis” for fear of getting her pregnant.

  Elisabeth did not find the nonsecretarial part of her job especially onerous. Indeed, she soon came to adore Elvis and would do willingly whatever he wanted. When they moved from a hotel into a house, she was given the room next to his.

  The rub for Elisabeth was that Elvis continued his revolving-door routine with girls. Often the guys would recruit beautiful young women to offer Elvis. Sometimes he would do his own recruiting from the young women who swirled about the front of the house and bring them in where his bodyguards and other male hangers-on gathered every evening to talk, sing, and drink lemonade. Lemonade was usually the mandatory drink in Elvis’s house after Gladys’s terminal encounter with alcohol. After a while, Elvis would invite one of the girls up to his room for sex. In her bed next door, Elisabeth could hear them. When the tryst was over and Elvis had sent the girl away, he would lie on his bed and knock on the wall three times to signal to Elisabeth that she should come over. Many nights she crawled into Elvis’s bed only minutes after the other girl had left, and she must have felt the lingering warmth of that girl’s body. She consoled herself that the other girls came and went, but she was the one who stayed.

  On or soon after Sunday, September 13, 1959, the girl who had just left was a fourteen-year-old ninth grader, Priscilla Beaulieu, whose father, an officer in the US Air Force, was stationed nearby in Wiesbaden. Priscilla had been recruited for Elvis by Currie Grant, an airman first class in the Air Force and an assistant manager of the Eagle Club, the military canteen in Wiesbaden, who had charmed his way into the group of young men surrounding Elvis. Though married and the father of two small children, he was, he confessed, a “sex addict,” and his major aim in life was to seduce very young women; in fact he targeted very young girls, such as Priscilla.

  During the summer of 1959 Currie had spotted Priscilla in the Eagle Club soon after she arrived in Europe. A stunning beauty, she had been elected the “Most Beautiful, Prettiest Eyes, Best Dressed” girl in her junior high school in Austin, Texas, that spring. He immediately engaged her in conversation. “Would you like to meet Elvis?” he asked. This was the ordinary bait used by men in Elvis’s coterie. Bringing in pretty girls for Elvis was a very pleasant part of their job. It raised their stock with Elvis, and there were always girls left over after Elvis had taken his pick. Almost forty years later, Currie told the writer Suzanne Finstad that Priscilla had approached him about an introduction and he had exacted sex from the fourteen-year-old girl four times before delivering her up to Elvis. Priscilla finally demanded her due, he said, and he took her to Elvis. Everyone in the room saw that Elvis was smitten at first sight.

  Priscilla vigorously denied that she had sex with Currie in order to meet Elvis. He had willingly invited her to meet Elvis, she said, and her parents had given permission only after questioning him closely. Her father was loving but very strict, she said. She was enthralled by Elvis from the first. Seemingly shy, Priscilla was actually merely quiet. She was observant and very smart. She had a gift for focusing intensely on what she wanted and getting it—sooner or later. For a dozen years, she wanted Elvis.

  Elvis, as always, was skillful in the wooing process. When he wanted, he could make a girl—an audience of one—feel that she was the only one in the whole world for him. For the moment, it was true. Elvis was a romantic; recurrently he felt that his dream was coming true. That evening he showered attention on the doll-like girl wearing, as Lamar Fike said, a “little blue-and-white sailor suit, and white socks.” He talked to her, played the piano for her, and—if not that night, within a few nights—sent her up to his room, where, after a discreet interval, he joined her. He made love to her in every way short of penetration
. It was as if Priscilla’s virginity were another thing that Elvis strangely and sorely needed to maintain.

  Priscilla was in Elvis’s bed in the house in Bad Nauheim practically every night that he was at home during his six months in Germany. Elvis taught her how to make love in various ways short of full intercourse, and she proved an apt pupil. As she wrote candidly in her book, Elvis and Me, every evening the pattern of ardent foreplay went on and on. Again and again, she pled with Elvis for the consummation of their love, but he steadfastly refused. It would spoil everything, he explained. Elvis did with Priscilla what he had learned to do with many of those hundreds of thousands of American girls who had followed him so passionately onstage, on records, on television and in the movies. In lovemaking, as in entertaining, Elvis’s outstanding talent was oral. Leaving Priscilla frustrated but technically virginal, he flew back to America in March 1960.

  The Other Girls

  Elvis had sex with other girls even while he only was having foreplay with Priscilla. His relationship with Elisabeth was different from all the others. She lived in his house and was Elvis’s insurance that he would not sleep alone. The girl in the bed, like Elisabeth and those who followed, was different from all the other girls in that she had a degree of permanence in her intimacy with Elvis—a year, two years or more, and sometimes even a possibility of marriage and, hence, presumed perpetuity.

  In addition to the girl in the bed, there were hundreds of other girls who had sex with Elvis. Lamar Fike, who lived in Elvis’s various houses and was almost glued to him from 1957 to 1962, said that his seemingly endless desire for sex with huge numbers of girls and young women came only after his mother’s death in 1958. There had been a river of sex before; now there was a flood.

  From the time of Gladys’s death until his own in 1977, between the transients and the relatively permanent, Elvis would always have some girl or young woman in his bed—for petting, for companionship, for a sense of comfort and security, for sex, for affirmation of his masculinity, for a complex of reasons that defy complete understanding. Lamar said that “his sexual appetites were very, very strong … Really, the touching and the feeling and the patting and everything else meant more to Elvis than the actual act.” Lamar summed up his description aptly. “I guess Elvis was the King of Foreplay,” he concluded.

  Other than simple availability, the only qualification for the young woman was that she be, by common consent among men, unusually attractive physically. Very often the girls were certified beauty queens, models, movie stars, or starlets. They always had to be women that other men would lust after, fantasize about, and envy him for. Never did his selection of a bedmate have to do with her intellectual prowess or strength of character.

  The girl in the bed—along with his extended family and the guys—became the third vital institution in Elvis’s personal life. It was as if he seized upon these ingredients and attempted to make the mix that would give him self-definition and a feeling of security after his mother’s passing. The ingredients were obvious, yet the mix was complex. The girls in Elvis’s bed, for example, related to the guys and his family in multifarious ways and evolved over time. But, clearly, the three-part pattern first took form in the household that Elvis created in Bad Nauheim in 1959 and 1960. On August 16, 1977, it was evident in the people who stood around his body on the bathroom floor at Graceland. One, Ginger Alden, had literally been the girl in the bed waiting for him at the very moment he died.

  The Sins of the Father

  In Bad Nauheim, Elisabeth Stefaniak bonded with Elvis’s grandmother Minnie Mae, whom everyone called “Grandma.” It was a relationship that Elvis encouraged. Indeed, it was virtually the only relationship that Elvis allowed her. Elisabeth and everyone else understood that she was hardly to look at any other man, much less become friendly with one. She was to keep her distance especially from the men in Elvis’s coterie, which included several of his buddies from the army, most notably fellow draftees Charlie Hodge and Joe Esposito.

  Elvis’s jealousy and consequent suspicions were boundless. For example, in March 1959, Elisabeth was riding with Vernon in Elvis’s Mercedes on the autobahn when Vernon lost control, flipped the car over several times, and put Elisabeth in the hospital. After first determining that his father was all right, Elvis went straight to Elisabeth’s hospital room, where he found her heavily bandaged and in much pain. Without expressing any feeling at all for her plight, he immediately demanded to know if she and his father had “engaged in any advances toward each other” just before the wreck.

  Elisabeth was aghast. What advances?! How could Elvis imagine such a shocking thing, his middle-aged father and his nineteen-year-old lover, contemplating sex together at all, much less engaging in such physical contact in a speeding car? She assured him that there were no advances. His father had always been a perfect gentleman to her, she said.

  While Elvis was outrageously insensitive in his treatment of Elisabeth, he had good reason to be suspicious of his father. Recurrently, Gladys had been angry with Vernon because he spent too much time down at the gate, where the girls were always eager to talk to him. She was furious when a beautiful blond Hollywood star came to Graceland during Elvis’s absence and Vernon rushed eagerly to play the host. There was no telling what Vernon had in mind, but the role could not have failed to inflate his manly ego. Gladys’s sister Lillian, who spent a lot of time at Graceland during these months, said that such things were the only things that Gladys and Vernon fought over.

  And they did fight. Billy Smith and Lamar Fike attested to that fact, and each was in a position to know. Billy was family, close family. He was Travis Smith’s son and during his childhood had sometimes lived in the same house with the Presleys and always nearby. He was loyal to Elvis and his immediate family, and he never wrote his own tell-all-and-more book. Yet he was generous in talking to interviewers, who found him straightforward and forthcoming. His stories had consistency and credibility. He had thought deeply about his experiences with his cousin and Gladys and Vernon. Generously, he shared his hard-won perspectives.

  Billy thought Vernon first started beating Gladys when Elvis went on the road. He picked times when Elvis was away and she was drinking and ill. Vernon would get mad at her. He himself drank, and “he got mean as a snake when he got drunk.” Once Gladys “had a mark on her face, right this side of her eye, on the left temple.” Billy’s father told him that when Elvis saw the mark he said, “Daddy, you lay a hand on her again, and I’ll kill you!”

  Lamar Fike, who lived with Elvis almost constantly from the summer of 1958 to 1962, added to the accounts of Vernon abusing Gladys. Elvis frequently called home, he thought, in part to make sure that Vernon was not mistreating his mother. He lived with the Presleys while they were in Killeen, Texas, from mid-June to September 1958, when Elvis was stationed at Fort Hood. Gladys and Vernon would argue, he said, Gladys screaming and Vernon mumbling in response. Lamar and Elvis once heard them arguing in another room. “You steercotted [castrated] bastard!” Gladys shouted at Vernon. Lamar turned to Elvis and said, “That’s the funniest line I’ve heard this year.” On one occasion while Gladys was cooking, they got into another fight, and Gladys hit Vernon on the side of his head with a pot of navy beans. Lamar and Elvis rushed into the kitchen to find Vernon lying on the floor out cold, covered with beans.

  “Vernon started jumping everything that moved the day after Gladys died,” Lamar recalled. Right after they returned to Texas following Gladys’s funeral, Vernon had picked up a blonde who came to the house. They drove away, and by the time they returned Elvis had come home. “Who is that?” he asked Lamar. He hardly needed to ask; he knew what was happening. When Vernon came in he said, “Daddy, I want to talk to you.” They went into a back bedroom. Vernon hemmed and hawed, but Elvis’s voice was clear. “Now look!” he said, “Mama ain’t been in the ground a week! We’re going to have some changes here!” When they got to Europe, Lamar said, Vernon got worse.

  “Dee�
�� Stanley was in her thirties, the mother of three boys, and the wife of army sergeant William Stanley. They lived near Elvis, and Dee took it upon herself in November 1958 to call Elvis, express condolences on the loss of his mother, and welcome him to Germany. The personal connection that justified such hospitality, she seemed to think, was that she too was a Southerner. Possibly she intended to engage Elvis in a romantic way, but he dodged the bullet by passing her invitation on to Vernon to deal with while he was away with the army on maneuvers. Vernon invited Dee to coffee in the restaurant in the hotel where the Presleys were then staying. In return, she invited him home to meet her husband. Coffee gave way to liquor, and liquor gave way to sex between Vernon and Dee, right under her husband’s nose. The sergeant was a heavy drinker and seemed not to notice. Even so, Elvis’s bodyguards, Lamar Fike and Red West, were alarmed. How could the husband not know? William Stanley had been one of General George Patton’s bodyguards, and he might get physical with Vernon.

  Soon Vernon grew even bolder. He started bringing Dee to the house in Bad Nauheim. He would take her into his room, just off the living room. Dee was very audible in her lovemaking, and her cries of ecstasy could be heard all over the house. Lamar recalled that “Vernon would come out of the room about twenty minutes later, and be real cocky, and he’d sit there.” Soon it got worse. “One time, they spent over an hour in there, and Elvis had about fifteen people in the house.” When “Dee started to holler, Elvis got up and started playing the piano so loud it made Liberace sound like a paraplegic.” Vernon’s romance with Dee was still in full blossom when Elvis suspected his father of making advances on Elisabeth. It was a bit too much.

  Elisabeth soon concluded that Elvis was jealous of any personal relationship that did not revolve around him, not just sexual relationships. He invested heavily and successfully in building up his connection with each person he brought into the circle. “He had a way of making anyone feel they were the most important person in the world to him,” she said. Once they were hooked, he demanded total and absolute loyalty. Violators were threatened with immediate expulsion, especially males, she thought. Lamar laughingly estimated that Elvis fired him 150 times, and even Billy Smith racked up several dismissals. Often the firing required what the participants considered clever dialogue.