Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  At first she had her reservations about seeing him at all. He was still involved with Margit, and often Elisabeth had to be the translator between them, which hurt her heart. “He was the man I adored, and the last thing I was interested in was helping their relationship blossom.”

  She would hear him with other girls through the walls, too, and even if she thought he was not doing any more with them than he was with her, it made her feel empty inside.

  “There would be at least a couple of girls each week, more on weekends. . . . These were often very beautiful girls [but] although I resented them, I knew they were not staying . . . I did not let him see me cry [and] all the time I was telling myself how lucky I was.”

  Elvis never apologized or tried to explain his actions. “I guess he never felt he owed me an explanation. I do remember the pain of getting into bed with him maybe ten or twenty minutes after another girl had left. Many times we never made love. He would sometimes just give me a good-night kiss and go to sleep. It was like a comfort thing for him.”

  Elisabeth could see that the combination of events—his mother’s death, his father’s fling with a married woman, his being away from home, friends, and family back in the States, and the potential loss of his career—served to make a private, much darker Elvis emerge during his time in Germany. His hot-flash temper seemed nearer the surface, “mostly when he would say harsh things to you. I never saw him throw things at me, but he could say some hurtful things.”

  The worst of it came one day on a shopping trip. There were things he needed for himself, and he wanted to buy Elisabeth some clothes. While they were out, he picked a waste can he wanted for his bathroom. “I said, ‘Elvis, you already have a basket in your bathroom.’ Well, that was the wrong thing to say. He turned to me and said, ‘Don’t you ever tell me what to buy or not to buy! If I want to buy a thousand trash cans . . .’ ”

  It was an awkward moment, a terrible moment, and when they walked out of the store, he was still angry. “I was going to buy you some clothes, but you ticked me off,” he told her. “Then for two days he didn’t speak to me very much.”

  She never got the wardrobe, but Rex put such behavior down to his friend’s natural complexity, now exacerbated by his pressures, including the expectation of being the perfect soldier, one who could never grumble or gripe like any other G.I. He had no real way to blow off steam when he was tired, discouraged, upset, lonesome, or bored. The press would have a field day with it, and Colonel Parker would have threatened to leave him—the last thing Elvis wanted when he was so insecure about his future.

  He bought a Grundig tape recorder to make some home recordings (“Danny Boy,” “Mona Lisa”), thinking music would be his outlet. But Rex thought it was more than just situational circumstances, that Elvis was in a serious psychological slide. “Elvis,” Rex says, “had two definite and distinct personalities.”

  He was promoted to private first class during the holidays, the army saying he was a soldier of “above normal capability.” But since it was his first Christmas without his mother, he was not in much of a mood to celebrate. It was “dismal,” as Lamar remembers. They set up a tree, and everybody went through the motions of giving presents. But it didn’t seem like Christmas, not even when Elvis sang an affecting rendition of “Silent Night” for the other soldiers. The guys bought some fireworks to cheer him, and Elvis, caught up in the moment, blasted German civilians from the balcony of the Hotel Grunewald, which got him in trouble with the owner, Herr Otto Schmidt.

  They were already on thin ice. Red had accidentally shot Herr Schmidt with a spring-loaded stopper gun, leaving a wooden stick dangling from a suction cup on his forehead. And Elvis had been reprimanded for other crazy stunts—water gun duels, wrestling matches, and noisy pillow fights in the hallways. Then Lamar bought a cane to torment an old lady who beat her own cane on the ceiling to tell them to pipe down. “It like to drove her crazy. She’d pound on that ceiling like there was no tomorrow, and I’d beat back on the floor like there was no tonight.”

  But the worst of it was when they nearly set fire to the hotel. In the middle of a shaving cream fight, Elvis locked himself in his room, and Red put a paper soaked with lighter fluid under the door and lit it. It coaxed Elvis out, all right, but smoke billowed out into the hallway, alarming the ultraconservative guests. That prompted an eviction notice, as well as a cautionary letter from Colonel Parker.

  It was time for Elvis to find his own house.

  Elvis and the fräuleins of the Moulin Rouge, Munich, 1959. Dancer Angie Zehetbauer, with whom Elvis was involved, stands at right. She would later commit suicide. (Courtesy of Andreas Roth)

  Chapter Eighteen

  House Full of Trouble

  In February 1959, Vernon found a white three-story, five-bedroom stucco house for rent at 14 Goethestrasse in Bad Nauheim. By American standards, the home was not well appointed or extraordinary, but it suited Elvis’s needs, mostly because it was roomy enough to accommodate his family and friends—two bathrooms, a large living room, a glassed-in porch off the kitchen, and a basement for storage. The house also offered a retreat from the restrictions of hotel life and separated him from the image of elitism associated with the Grunewald. Now he could maintain his posture as a regular G.I., living off base with his dependents.

  The downside was that he paid an exorbitant rent, roughly $800 a month, at least five times the going rate. However, the landlady, the obstinate and rotund Frau Pieper (“a bitch and a half,” in Lamar’s view), knew that she could command it and made hay of her opportunity. Moreover, as part of the deal, she insisted on staying there as the housekeeper, mostly to keep an eye on her tenants and her property. Fans kept a constant vigil, some camping out in tents a hundred yards from the house, others covering the wooden fence with lipstick confessions of torrid desire. When he sings, one girl said, “gold comes out of his hot throat.”

  Even a house as large as Frau Pieper’s could not always accommodate two female heads, however, and Frau Pieper and Minnie Mae, who shopped together, cooked together, and drank together in local cafés, often butted heads. They made quite a pair—one tall and skinny and cursing in English, the other short and fat and cursing in German—chasing each other around the house with a broom. Then they’d make up and swap recipes, Minnie Mae learning to fix Wiener schnitzel, and Frau Pieper serving up a plate of southern “cat head” biscuits.

  Lamar found it hilarious. “Frau Pieper mouthed off to her one day, and Grandma threw a skillet at her. She missed her that time, but later on she decked her.” Elvis offered to rent her an apartment, but she refused. Then Lamar threw a firecracker under her bed. But Frau Pieper was not moving: She now had romantic designs on Vernon and couldn’t keep her hands off Elvis, either. When she’d catch him in a bear hug, he’d smile and hurl insults at her (“Get away from me, you fat slob!”), knowing she hadn’t a clue what he’d said. When Frau Pieper asked Elisabeth to translate, she covered for him: “He said you look nice today!”

  Elvis left the house at five-thirty each morning to report for duty, which meant he was up by four-thirty for breakfast at five. But since he was hosting parties or playing music with Charlie and Red until late into the night—he had rented a piano and was trying to expand his vocal range—he found it hard to stay awake.

  A sergeant in Grafenwöhr gave him amphetamines on maneuvers, but he was out of them now, and he went in search of a pharmacy mate who could get Dexedrine, his mother’s drug of choice, in quart-size bottles. It was amazing what money and fame could do, and almost no one said no to Elvis. He seemed to do everything to excess these days, from buying uniforms (as many as a hundred) to bedding girls. Pills were no exception.

  If Elvis got up at dawn, everyone had to get up at dawn, so all the guys took Dexedrine to match his schedule and energy level. He assured Rex the pills wouldn’t hurt him.

  “Truck drivers back in the States use these all the time to stay awake on long trips,” he told him. The only s
ide effects were good ones—Dexedrine was an appetite suppressant, and doctors prescribed it to overweight people every day. Plus, uppers increased your sex drive, gave you pocket rockets. He washed his down with hot coffee for an extra caffeine jolt, he said, and recommended Rex do the same.

  “After taking my first pill,” Rex later wrote in his memoir, Sergeant Presley: Our Untold Story of Elvis’ Missing Years, “I actually felt the hair on my head standing up and a surge of energy bolting through my body. Elvis was completely right about one thing—that white pill provided me with an abundance of strength and energy I didn’t know I had. I could take them and stay awake an entire weekend. I was astonished that after taking only one pill, I could easily go 24 hours without food or sleep. And they were harmless!”

  Any time Rex ran out, Elvis handed him a hundred.

  Vernon knew about the amphetamines and on occasion took them himself. Elisabeth, too, was aware of them, as Elvis gave her some on the nights they went to the shows and clubs in Frankfurt. He particularly liked the Holiday on Ice extravaganza, as he’d become enamored of several of the skaters, who numbered among the women who came home with him. “Beautiful girls were constantly coming and going,” Elisabeth found. “I had to painfully accept this, and just grin and bear it.”

  With Gladys’s death, says Lamar, “he just let loose sexually. He was after everything he could get. I watched it change. But he had no compunction about that kind of stuff. To him, it was just banging. He had absolutely no guilt and no trouble balancing his behavior with his religious beliefs.”

  Hit-and-run sex, then, was a way for Elvis to shut out his grief, forfeit his past, and quell his inhibitions. He was the most famous man on the planet, a millionaire several times over, with the world at his feet. But he had lost the only thing in life he truly loved. It was as if the devil himself had set a price for him to pay. But the excitement and arousal of a young girl made a lot of things go away—the Assembly of God church, Judge Marion Gooding, and his regret over Dixie and June. In the dark, skin on skin, everything felt good and right. It made him feel alive. It made him feel that Satnin’ was still alive, and he could pat on her and call her baby. That’s all he knew, and that’s all he wanted to know for the moment.

  Several of the guys, especially Rex, felt sorry for Elisabeth and wondered about the cruelty and callousness with which Elvis paraded girls in front of her. “Sometimes she looked like she was about to cry,” Rex later wrote. She was completely in love with Elvis. And it was deflating and degrading for her to spend all day answering his love letters, and then hear his muffled moans with others through the walls.

  Near the end of 1958, he had told her that a girl named Janie Wilbanks was coming to visit, and he wanted Elisabeth to make her feel at home, even share her office-bedroom. Janie had been the girl George Klein introduced him to at the train refueling in Memphis. George had only just met her himself that day, when she walked up to him at the station. Even George was taken with her (“I don’t know if she went to Ole Miss at the time, but she was a typical Ole Miss beautiful girl”), and he figured Elvis would like her, too. She had coal black eyes.

  A photographer had captured their kiss and put it on the newswire. But more important, Elvis had called George two weeks later, saying, “Who in the hell was that girl? Man, she was good-looking! Tell her to send me some pictures and write to me.” That December, she came to Germany to see her uncle, an army captain, and stayed with Elvis for a week. Elisabeth was “instantly jealous” but ended up making friends with the pretty eighteen-year-old, as they both realized they were just two of the thousands of girls vying for his affections.

  The next glint in his eye was an eighteen-year-old actress, the delicate, green-eyed Vera Tschechowa, whom he’d met in January 1959 while doing publicity pictures for Confidential magazine, building on a session he’d done in late 1958 for the March of Dimes. In this latest calculation of the Colonel to keep Elvis in the public eye, Elvis posed with a young polio victim, Robert Stephen Marquette, the son of Master Sergeant John Marquette, stationed in Friedberg. Robert wore leg braces and was confined to a wheelchair. In the first session, Elvis was photographed bending down next to the chair, his hand on Robert’s, his hat on the boy’s head. In another picture from that same session, the two plaintively held a sign that said GIVE.

  But a third photo, taken in January, involved Vera, who had just made a film in America and who conveniently spoke English. Now only thirteen years after the end of World War II, it seemed a perfect moment of German–American alliance. Vera and Elvis stood on either side of Robert, Vera holding one of the boy’s hands, and Elvis the other. But the way Elvis looked at the comely brunette, Robert might as well have not even been in the room.

  Vera was far more worldly than Margit Buergin. Her grandfather was the nephew of Anton Chekhov, the famous Russian playwright, and her grandmother Olga one of the most popular stars of the silent film era. A favorite of Adolf Hitler (she always called him “The Führer”), Olga was reputedly a Russian agent in Nazi Germany. (“They had handwritten notes from Hitler on their walls in Munich,” says Lamar.) Vera’s mother, Ada, was likewise an actress in films, and Vera was following in their footsteps. She had just been voted Germany’s number one pinup girl, with some sixty-five fan clubs, and the German papers were keen to turn her slight involvement with Elvis into a romance, whether it really blossomed into one or not.

  When interviewed about Elvis in the 1970s, Vera seemed to find the entire subject distasteful, beginning with the notion of posing with Elvis and a disabled boy. Her involvement with the photographs came about because “somehow they were missing a woman to be used like parsley or trimming.”

  “We took these horrible pictures,” she said. “What terrible trash. The child bound to a wheelchair, and Elvis standing with the child. I was somewhere with the nervous parents. I talked a little bit with him. Not much, just a couple of sentences.”

  “Vera was a strange girl,” in Lamar’s view. “The longer you were around her, the crazier she got.” He warned Elvis to stay away from her, he says, but Elvis, who called her “Kitty Cat” for the shape and color of her eyes, was intent on pursuing her. “Once Elvis had her in his crosshairs, there was no turning him back.”

  In early March, he got a three-day pass and went to Munich to see her, planning also to take in the nightclubs with Red and Lamar. The driver, Josef Wehrheim, motored them over in Elvis’s new 300 Mercedes four-door sedan, and they accepted an invitation to stay with the Tschechowas in Obermenzing. A photographer from Bild Zeitung, Germany’s answer to the National Enquirer, accompanied Elvis and Vera on their dates. According to Lamar, the magazine had already photographed the two in Bad Nauheim at the Hotel Grunewald. And Rex remembers that she invited the whole group to a local movie theater to see one of her films, Elisabeth translating the dialogue.

  Now Vera was performing in a minor play, The Seducer, in Munich’s Theatre unter den Arkaden, a small boulevard venue in the Maximilianstrasse. Elvis told Vera’s mother, Ada, that he wanted to see it.

  “You won’t understand a word of it,” she said.

  “That doesn’t matter,” he replied, and then rented out the entire theater for himself and Red and Lamar. It was more of a grand romantic gesture than a practical act for a star who might be mobbed. And when Elvis sat in the first row, beaming up at her, Vera found it embarrassing and “miserable” to perform with only three people in front of the stage. Afterward, he took her mother and her theatrical friends to an expensive dinner at the Kanne restaurant, Red and Lamar tagging along.

  “Red and I felt funny around Vera,” Lamar remembers. “It was like she was already looking down her nose at us.” Vera and Ada, however, found it odd that Elvis’s bodyguards, as they called them, stood around him like walls and went with him everywhere, even to the toilet. Elvis, Vera thought, “was incredibly shy, a typical American middle-class boy, well bred with a crease. No hooligan at all.” But after the three spent the night at th
e Tschechowas’ home, Vera was less complimentary about Red and Lamar, whom she considered uncouth.

  “They were very ordinary, with belching and farting and everything that belongs with it.” And her mother objected to their foul language, their refrigerator raids, and their penchant for putting their feet on the table. Elvis suggested his friends check into the nearby Hotel Edelweiss, where they got caught and were evicted for bringing women in through the window. Elvis, meanwhile, remained the Tschechowas’ houseguest.

  In the next two days, Elvis and Vera watched a Viking movie in production at the Bavaria Film Studios in Geiselgasteig, and took a boat ride on Lake Starnberg, a popular recreational area. “Elvis was after her, all right,” Lamar remembers, but in the photographs, neither looks especially happy to be there.

  Elvis’s trip to Munich would be far more memorable for his three visits to the Moulin Rouge, a strip club, where he was photographed in suggestive poses with a number of scantily clad dancers, B-girls, and hookers. In several shots, he is shown aggressively kissing twin showgirls, the Orkowskis, first pushing one back along a stair rail, and then mashing the other against the opposite wall. He was also photographed in similar situations at another location, the Eve Bar, on his first night there.

  In contrast to the playful and sexy tone of Al Wertheimer’s famous photograph, The Kiss, shot in Richmond, Virginia, only three years earlier, the German pictures, most of them taken by Rudolf Paulini, the house photographer of the Moulin Rouge, have a seedy, depraved, and somewhat pornographic feel about them. Elvis seems dazed, almost in a trance, and the women, predatory and reptilian, have a nightmarish look, as if sprung from a vampire’s dream. The photographs run totally at odds with Elvis’s wholesome, all-American image and are, in fact, so sensational and shocking that they might have ruined him had they been published at the time. They look, says rock critic Dave Marsh, like “the answer to a question no one thought to ask.”