Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  The girls insisted that nothing overtly sexual happened inside Elvis’s pink lair, though it came close on occasion, as Gloria remembered.

  “We’d tickle, fight, laugh, mess around, but all you’d have to say is, ‘Stop!,’ and he’d roll over and quit. It would never be mentioned again that night. But next time, it would be the same thing exactly. You’d fight with him, kid around and scuffle. The next thing, he’d get serious and you’d just push him away. I think that if he really pushed, I would have done it.”

  No matter how Elvis defined his philosophy of rearing young girls, the relationship contained a strong erotic element and was reminiscent of the days when he invited several girls into his room at once on the Hayride. Now Elvis and the girls would sit on the bed yoga style, with Elvis in the middle, and he’d kiss each one. “Gloria is jealous ’cause I kissed Frances,” he’d say, and then turn it around: “Frances is jealous ’cause I kissed Heidi.” Eventually, they’d tire of it all, and Elvis would turn out the light, lying with an arm around two of them, with the third girl stretched out across his feet.

  “Elvis was always kissing,” says Frances, “and it was a good kiss, a real good one. He might be doing anything—playing pool, anything—he’d walk up and kiss you, or he might turn his cheek for you to kiss him. He did that in the car a lot. He was especially romantic when it was just you and him. He might talk to you about things that bothered him, and just like teenagers, you’d neck a little bit. Elvis was like a teenager somewhat—the things we did were things that kids do. They really were all very innocent. A lot of people didn’t think so, but it was a different day and time.”

  Heidi, Gloria, and Frances were always the last fans to leave Audubon Drive. At three or four in the morning, Elvis would sit up and kiss each girl and say, “I love you, and I’ll see you tomorrow.” Lamar would drive them home, and they’d catch a few hours of sleep before getting up and going to junior high. “The amazing thing is that I never had one problem with any of the parents. Not ever. It was something I assumed would not happen, and it didn’t.”

  Elvis didn’t want his mother to know they’d stayed so late, and before Gladys got up, they were out and gone. But chances are she was well aware that they were there, and that she probably wouldn’t have minded, given her approval of Jackie Rowland. She knew that Elvis, a boy-man, was looking for a child-woman he could mold into his idea of a perfect mate. Fourteen-year-olds were just the right age, as they allowed him to play the role of the older man who would teach them about life. If he could find one who had his mother’s coloring, who shared her values, and who also somehow felt like his twin soul, she would hold him captive.

  His friendship with the trio lasted through the early 1960s, about the time he met fourteen-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu.

  On January 14, 1957, Elvis reported to Paramount Studios in Los Angeles, where makeup supervisor Wally Westmore fulfilled one of the star’s lifelong dreams—to have his hair professionally dyed black. (The exact shade was “mink brown,” so dark brown as to appear black on camera.) Aside from his stint in the army, when he was forced to revert to his natural hair color, never again would he completely change it back. Though he’d inherited his hair color from his father, now he looked more like Gladys. It bolstered their bond, their oneness.

  Finally, Elvis also looked like Tony Curtis, whose work he still studied. He met his early idol one day on the Paramount lot. Curtis still remembers it.

  “On lunch hour, I’d go for a walk. One day, I went by this big camper, and the door opened, and there was Elvis. He reached down and took my arm and said, ‘Mr. Curtis, won’t you please come in for a minute? I’ve been a fan of yours ever since I was a kid. I want you to meet my buddies.’ He introduced me to them one by one, and he said, ‘What a joy, what an experience, Mr. Curtis, to finally meet you!’ I said, ‘Excuse me, please, don’t call me Mr. Curtis. Call me Tony.’ He said, ‘Tony.’ And I said, ‘And what shall I call you?’ He thought for a second, and he said, ‘Mr. Elvis Presley.’ ”

  In Elvis’s view, the black hair was only one of several cosmetic improvements necessary to transform him to movie star perfection. He’d already had his teeth capped. But he’d always felt the bridge of his nose was too broad—with his darker skin tone, he thought it sometimes made him look Negroid—and he wanted a more refined profile. Some time between Love Me Tender and Loving You, he went to Hollywood’s Dr. Maury Parks, a favorite among the film elite, to streamline his nose, sand away his acne, and tighten the skin around his jawline.

  Elvis would return to Dr. Parks in years to come. But at first he was skittish about any such procedure, and so he took George Klein with him, footing the bill for George’s nose bob. Elvis had always liked Barbara Hearn’s nose, so he brought along his favorite portrait of her and presented it to Dr. Parks as a model for George’s new look. After the procedure, Elvis referred to George’s proboscis as “Barbara’s nose.”

  He might as well have used the Loving You ingenue, Dolores Hart, as an ideal, for the seventeen-year-old actress was the picture of fresh-faced innocence.

  Born in Chicago as Dolores Hicks, she spent her early years in Los Angeles. Her father, Bert, was an actor, doing bit parts in films. And her uncle was the opera legend Mario Lanza, one of Elvis’s favorite singers.

  Hart’s parents divorced when she was small, but to escape their bickering, the child wrote a letter to her grandparents in the Windy City, asking if she might live with them. She arrived on the train, alone, with a ticket pinned to her coat. “From the age of seven, I never wanted to be anything but an actress,” she says, in part to assuage her sudden mood swings: “I’m positive I’m somewhat manic-depressive by nature. I don’t think there’s anyone any happier than I am when I’m happy, or can take a nosedive quicker in the face of tragedy. I made a career of looking like an obvious neutral, rather than parading my feelings of being in the depths or at the heights.”

  She learned her craft in one of Chicago’s elegant movie palaces, where her grandfather worked as a projectionist. The child often went with him to work, awakening him from naps every twelve minutes so he could change the reels.

  Loving You, in which Hart plays Elvis’s young love interest, was her first film. She won her contract after her remarkable lead performance in a Loyola Marymount University production of Joan of Lorraine led to an interview at Paramount. She arrived in her school sweater and bobby socks, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail.

  Within two weeks, she was on the set, but as a scholarship student who hit the books hard, she hadn’t kept up with popular music and had no idea who Elvis was, really. He was just a “charming, simple young boy with longer sideburns than most.” But he had impeccable manners. When they were introduced, “He couldn’t have been more gracious. He jumped to his feet and said, ‘Good afternoon, Miss Dolores.’ ”

  Elvis found her the quintessential shy virgin—she was such a delicate girl, so untouched by worldly experience as to seem almost unreal. But it was obvious that she lived her religion, and as a devout Catholic, she insisted her favorite childhood memory was of her baptism at age ten. With Elvis, she made it clear right off the bat that she would not entertain the idea of mixing work with romance, because she didn’t think it appropriate.

  Still, something in her responded to the primal beat of his music, and she found him both magnetic and thrilling. When he performed the musical numbers on the set, “I couldn’t take myself away from him. Even if I wasn’t in the scene, I still went to hear him sing, because he was just riveting. You were just dragged away—your soul just took you. He was so dynamic.”

  When they kissed for the cameras, they both felt a connection. Dolores blushed way back to her neck, and “my ears started getting purple,” and even Elvis’s ears turned red. Director Kanter called, “Cut,” and the makeup crew rushed over. But Elvis and Dolores both laughed it off, knowing it would be a mistake for them to get involved.

  In an intriguing bit of casting, veteran
actress Lizabeth Scott played something akin to a female version of Colonel Parker, except that as Deke’s publicist/manager, her feelings for him bounced from maternal to vaguely erotic. Their brief romantic scenes carried a kind of androgynous magnetism—he too innocent and pretty, she too strong and dominant—even as they also telegraphed something taboo for the late 1950s. Today they remain compulsively watchable.

  Scott, born Emma Matzo in Scranton, Pennsylvania, was a pointed-bra blond whose Slovakian features spoke of an underlying cruelty. Like Lauren Bacall before her, she exuded a delicious sensuality that managed to be both icy and fiery hot. Off set, she was as captivated with Elvis as Dolores Hart, but for a different reason. “I’ve always thought that his eyes had been underplayed, and his pelvis has been overplayed. The shadows around his eyes fascinated me, and I can’t tell you why. They were powerful, piercing, playful, and sexy, but I wasn’t aroused sexually. I just saw all these things in his eyes.”

  Elvis was fairly certain that he hadn’t aroused her, because two years earlier, Confidential magazine had outed her as a lesbian with a very busy little black book. The husky-voiced Scott, who never married, sued the publication, but it was an enormous scandal, and the public viewed her as a deviant. Hal Wallis, who had signed her in 1945 at age twenty-two, kept her on the back burner for a while, but after Loving You, she disappeared from pictures for fifteen years, resurfacing in 1972 with the quirky British film Pulp. Around that time, she spoke of her retirement, saying she’d never thought of it as such. “I simply decided there was more to life than just making films. The most important thing to me is my personal life.”

  Lizabeth tried to bond with Elvis, believing he was extremely intelligent, with a photographic memory, perhaps. But alas, “You couldn’t have an intimate conversation with him because of his entourage.” And so she tried a different tack. Seeing that the guys played with water guns on the set, Lizabeth joined in. “If anything, I had fun with him and his boyfriends, because I had a water pistol, too! So we water pistoled each other rather than verbalize.”

  Yet Elvis was somewhat scared of her, as it was the first time he had knowingly been around such an exotic woman. The notion of her sexuality both titillated and confused him (he pronounced her “unholy”), especially since Junior teased him unmercifully. “Are you gonna take her to bed tonight, Elvis?” Junior taunted, Cliff and Gene joining in raucous glee. “Don’t worry,” Elvis shot back nervously, trying to hide his discomfort. And he did invite her up to his suite at the Beverly Wilshire. But Lizabeth wanted no part of it. She was a sophisticated, smart lady, and she knew the guys had put him up to it.

  “They weren’t of the same mettle that he was. He was just an entity unto himself. It was like the halo just went all around him. What can you say? That was Elvis.”

  Deke’s mascaraed eyelashes lent Elvis’s character an air of gay desire, but no stories of homosexual dalliance or acting out ever surfaced about Elvis himself. In Hollywood, he invariably worked with actors, stagehands, and dancers who were gay, and when he had to be carried or lifted up overhead, occasionally one of them groped him. He didn’t particularly like it, but it didn’t spark his temper, either. Mostly, he chuckled.

  Still, Byron Raphael, the Colonel’s young emissary in 1956 and 1957, remembered that when Elvis first went to Hollywood, he was totally unprepared for his visit with rock-and-roll queen Little Richard, whose songs (“Tutti Frutti”) Elvis had performed for several years.

  A fellow southerner (born in Macon, Georgia, as Richard Wayne Penniman), Little Richard invited Elvis to his house after hearing that he had referred to him as “a friend of mine . . . [but] I never met him” onstage in the spring of 1956. On the surface, they seemed to be interracial twins—both wearing mile-high pompadours and makeup, and both melding gospel and rhythm and blues into a new art form.

  Elvis was in complete awe of Little Richard, and Byron recalled that Elvis beamed when the piano-pumping sensation called the Colonel’s office to say he was sending a limousine to bring the star out for a visit. Parker insisted that Byron accompany Elvis, who brought along Cliff and Gene.

  When they arrived, two beautifully coiffed women with lavender skin and dazzling jewelry opened the door, and then welcomed them with ceremonial grace. Moments later, Little Richard, wearing what could only be called “a bright gold gown,” as Byron put it, literally danced into the room. Elvis had never seen a black entertainer so wildly tricked out, not even in the seamier clubs of Beale Street, and “his eyes got wide as saucers,” Byron said. Their host had powdered his face a ghostly shade of white and accentuated his dress with diamond earrings, gold chains, a ring on every finger, and a wig that snaked six inches toward the heavens.

  Elvis and his friends stood there motionless as Little Richard rushed around the room, slapping at them playfully and fawning over Elvis and his talent. Elvis returned the compliment, and his new friend fluttered his false eyelashes. “Oh, shut up!” Little Richard said, giggling, and then turned to Gene and Byron. “And you shut up, too!” With that, the two musicians traded performances at the piano, and then it was over. On the way back, Elvis and Cliff guffawed and rolled their eyes, but Gene’s face was fixed in a quizzical gaze, wondering why such gorgeous doorkeepers had such large Adam’s apples.

  For a time, Elvis tried to integrate himself in the film community, even though Colonel Parker didn’t want him mingling much. The Colonel preferred that he stay secluded at the Beverly Wilshire, both to give him an air of mystery, and to keep him away from the influence of others, particularly stars who might suggest other representation.

  Elvis’s fame was already such that he couldn’t take a woman to dinner, but that also worked in his favor, helping ensure he wouldn’t sleep alone that night. He simply invited girls to the party he held in his suite each evening.

  Such blanket invitations lessened the chance for personal rejection, but they also allowed for a more practical cover, meaning other members of his entourage could take the blame if Elvis got a girl pregnant. Byron believed that may have happened, as the Colonel had several important dinners with the parents of young girls who spent too much time with his client. After that, the Colonel had a directive: “When any girl comes up to Elvis’s room, I want to make sure at least two of you guys are around. That way, if any problems come up, you can say, ‘Well, we made it with her, too.’ ” Any woman who came up to see Elvis, then—even a famous actress—would have to sit around with one of the other guys before she went in alone with Elvis.

  Elvis defied the Colonel at first, wanting to attend his share of Hollywood parties and see the town. One day he was riding a bicycle on the Paramount lot and stopped to meet Valerie Allen, a young starlet walking his way.

  “I want to take your picture, honey, with me on the bicycle,” he said, and as Valerie found him “the most handsome young man I think I’ve ever seen in my life,” she invited him to a party at her studio apartment. But as soon as he came in the door, one of the guests said something derogatory about him, and wounded, he disappeared before Valerie could make her way over to him.

  Still, he saw her occasionally for the next year or so—she later became Mrs. Troy Donahue—but there were too many women after him for anything real to develop. Some of them, like B movie queen Jeanne Carmen, weren’t shy about one-night stands. Neither was Elvis, who was becoming increasingly hedonistic.

  Parker fretted about it, especially with the morals clause in Elvis’s contract, and strictly forbade him to be photographed in situations that would give Paramount any reason to cut him loose.

  “I was at a party,” remembered Carmen, a notorious bombshell. “I had this Indian costume on and not much else, just a little thing going between the legs, and no bra. Elvis walked in and went, ‘Uh, hello.’ The photographer started shooting us and all of a sudden, his manager came along and pulled him away.”

  Elvis intended to see the busty blond anyway. She excited him on several levels—she was a former consort of mobster
Johnny Roselli, and a pal of both Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe, whom she favored. Though she was five years his senior, he invited her over to the hotel. “The first day I went to meet him, I was sitting in a chair, and he was sitting in another chair opposite me, playing the guitar. All of a sudden he strummed and said, ‘Are you wearing any panties?’ That was his favorite thing to ask any girl. And, of course, I wasn’t.”

  Jeanne, an Arkansas girl who grew up picking cotton in Paragould, related to Elvis’s simple tastes in food, and she had him to her place for dinner on occasion. “I cooked southern-fried chicken for him, just like his mother. He brought me a present one night, and I thought, ‘Oh, he’s going to give me an outfit.’ I opened it up and it turned out to be a little French apron. I put it on with nothing else, and everything was going great until I bent over to look to see if the chicken was done. Obviously, it burned that night.”

  Elvis had his mother very much on his mind during the filming of Loving You, as at the end of January 1957, she was admitted to Baptist Hospital for tests. She stayed nearly two weeks, as doctors probed to find the cause of the abnormally dark circles around her eyes. They checked her liver, too, suspecting cirrhosis or hepatitis, since she admitted that she drank and used pills. But if the tests were conclusive, no one talked about them at the time.

  Barbara Hearn spent two days with her in the hospital. “She did not look seriously ill, and silly as it seems, we had a very good time. I created some crazy hairdos for her, and filed and polished her nails, and we had something like a girl party in her room. For some reason I was the only one with her for hours and hours each day.”

  Her hospitalization delayed the Presleys’ trip to Hollywood, but four days after her release, Gladys and Vernon, accompanied by their friends Willy and Carl Nichols (Carl was the contractor working on the house), took a night train for Los Angeles. Elvis gave them a tour of Beverly Hills and drove them past Debra Paget’s house as an excuse to try to see her.