Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  He addressed her as “My Dearest Darling ‘Little,’ ” and began by saying how miserable he was out in the field. He was down with a fever and tonsillitis again, he wrote, and listening to the radio. His only consolation was that his tour of duty was almost over, and he would soon come home to his career, friends, and “most of all you, my darling.”

  His reason for writing, he told her in well-thought-out paragraphs, was that he was worried about how she might react when he did return home. He didn’t know how she felt about him now, he said, “because after all, two years is a long time in a young girl’s life.”

  It was a curious choice of words, considering that Anita would turn twenty-one in May, and was nearly a woman, while fourteen-year-old Priscilla was clearly a child. His words suggest that he was melding them emotionally in his mind. But on the surface, he seems concerned that Anita may have gotten older and wiser, and that she might have moved on.

  Whether Elvis wrote the letter as much to make up his own mind between his two loves, he spent the majority of it declaring his love for Anita and apologizing for things she might have read or heard. He also said that he had the feeling she had cooled on him, not only because she hadn’t written to him, but also because of the sound of her voice on the phone. “The warmth and love seems to have dimmed,” he said.

  I want you to know that in spite of our being apart, I have developed a love for you that cannot be equaled or surpassed by anyone. My every thought is you, my darling. Every song I hear, every sunset reminds me of the happy and wonderful times we’ve spent together. I tell you this because I want you to know my feelings toward you have not changed, but instead has [sic] grown stronger than I ever thought it [sic] could.

  I have hurt you sometimes because I was mad at some of the things you did, or I thought you did, but every time these things happened, I thought that maybe you only liked me for what I am, and didn’t really love me for myself. . . . The fact remains, if it’s really love, Anita, if we really love each other, it will last . . . although things will come up in the future that will hurt us both. They are to be expected.

  Please believe me when I tell you it’s you and only you, my darling. But I think that you will keep our word, and tell me if you had grown to care for someone else and vice versa . . . Darling, I pray that you haven’t let your loneliness, passions, and desires make you do something that would hurt me. If you have, it is better you tell me now. I can’t believe you have or would.

  So darling, if you still feel the same and if you love me and me alone, we will have a great life together, even though you hear things and read things. Just think as you said, everyone knows how I feel about you. I can’t explain to you how I crave you and desire your lips and your body under me, darling. I can feel it now. The things we did and the desire we had for each other’s body!!! Remember, darling, “True love holds its laurels through the ages no matter how loud the clamor of denial.” That which deserves to live—lives.

  Yours alone,

  EP

  In challenging Anita to “keep our word” about growing to care for someone else, Elvis breaks his word in not being truthful with her about Priscilla.

  Anita had read about her in the papers, and “he assured me that this was a child, a fourteen-year-old child.” While she considered this letter from Elvis to be “a little cruel,” she says, “I had been a little cruel to him.”

  If he really thought that Anita might leave him, it would have been a grave concern, particularly now that he was returning to Graceland for the first time since his mother’s death. His letter suggests that his real intention in writing was to secure Anita as a backup—that he was making certain he had, literally, a warm body awaiting his return from frozen, frosty Deutschland.

  Elvis’s psychological set would have mandated a backup, in case he had trouble with Captain Beaulieu, for his relationship with Priscilla had to feel tenuous, given her age and the fact that she would remain in Germany when he went home. If Priscilla were the new obsession, “Anita was a known entity, comfort food for the mind, a distant, parsed-off reality that in Elvis’s mind smelled, felt, reeked of home, Gladys, Memphis, and stardom,” says psychologist Whitmer. “Whatever carnality the two of them had enjoyed, that, too, would be exponentially magnified.”

  Elvis’s reference to two years being “a long time in a young girl’s life” may also have been his subconscious—and accurate—assessment of the time it would take to get Priscilla to Memphis. Yet given the malleable mind of a fourteen-year-old, Elvis must have sensed that he was in the catbird seat in being able to mold her during those years, even from afar.

  That Christmas, he arranged for a French poodle to be delivered to Anita, while at a party at Goethestrasse for his family and friends, he had Priscilla sit next to him at the piano as he sang “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” She was furious with him—when he started to switch to guitar, he nonchalantly asked two English girls where his pick was. One of them told him its precise location: “It’s upstairs on the table right beside your bed,” she answered, smiling. “I’ll get it.”

  Priscilla, who’d given Elvis a pair of bongo drums for Christmas, knew he had betrayed her once more. But he denied it, explaining that he’d mentioned how unkempt his bedroom was, and the girl had merely offered to clean it for him. Priscilla didn’t believe him, but now, at the piano, “when he leaned over and gently kissed me, when he told me I was the one, the only one, when I saw tears in his eyes, nothing in the world mattered but our love. Nothing mattered but him.”

  When Elvis returned from winter maneuvers, he contacted a South African doctor named Laurenz Johannes Griessel Landau, who advertised herbal skin treatments to reduce acne scars and enlarged pores. Elvis, who “had pores big enough to hide a tank in,” as Lamar put it, fretted about how he looked in his close-ups on screen, and began weekly treatments with the doctor. But their association came to an end when the dermatologist—who turned out not to have a medical degree at all—made inappropriate advances to Elvis during a procedure. “He eased his hand down between Elvis’s legs and gave him a good squeeze,” Lamar remembers. “And, boy, Elvis jumped thirty feet up in the air.”

  Elvis told him to get out, that his work was finished. But Landau was not so easily dismissed. He had tape recordings and pictures of Elvis and “a young, young girl” in intimate situations, he said, and he threatened to expose them. Panicked, Elvis gave Landau enough money to relocate to London. Then he called the Colonel, who recommended that he go to the army’s Provost Marshal Division, which referred the case to the FBI.

  It never occurred to Elvis to end his inappropriate relationship with Priscilla, however, nor to curtail his activities with the dancers and strippers at the clubs. In early January 1960, just after his twenty-fifth birthday, he returned to Paris for six days with Cliff, Lamar, and Joe, acting as his new friend’s tour guide in the romantic city. Joe, at Vernon’s request, would keep tabs on the expenditures, a job he would do well, impressing not only Vernon and Elvis, but also their accountant back in Memphis.

  “We just played all night and slept during the day,” Joe remembers. (“Well, I’ll tell you, it’s a gay town . . . if you like nightlife and everything,” Elvis would soon remark to Armed Forces Radio.) They stayed in the penthouse at the George V Hotel and hit all of Elvis’s usual nightspots, taking in the drag show at Le Bantu. Elvis had enjoyed an encounter with a female contortionist in Frankfurt one night (“He stayed in that dressing room five or six hours—came out of there wringing wet,” Lamar says), but he kept his distance from the impersonators. Lamar and Cliff had already gotten burned, and he didn’t want to be next.

  Elvis had a more legitimate reason for going to Paris—to further his new study of karate. (“It gave him permission to be a badass,” says Lamar.) For the last month, he had been taking lessons twice a week from Jurgen Seydel, the father of German karate. Elvis had been fascinated by martial arts since 1957, when Tura Satana mentioned their influence on her strip
act and showed him some of the moves. Only recently, he had read a magazine article about Hank Slamansky, the ex-marine who introduced the sport into the armed services. Seydel saw how serious Elvis was about it and recommended that he take classes from the Japanese instructor Tetsuji Murakami in Paris.

  Within days of returning to Germany, he was promoted to acting sergeant, and after another round of maneuvers, he threw a party to celebrate his forthcoming transfer. His army experience was finally coming to an end. On March 3, 1960, he would be on his way home, flying into Fort Dix, New Jersey. “They thought I couldn’t take it, and I was determined to go to any limits to prove otherwise,” he told Armed Forces Radio.

  Now he began making real plans to resume his old life in the States. Joe Esposito would go to work for him when they got home, and Elisabeth had agreed to come to Graceland to be his secretary, with occasional trips to Hollywood. Elvis hoped Rex Mansfield would also join the group as his road manager, and he would talk with him about it on the train heading home to Memphis. They had walked every step of their army hitch together, from the first day to the last.

  Looking back on it all, he defined his time in the service as a blessing in disguise. “It was a time of grief for me. . . . It came at a time when I sorely needed a change. God’s hand at work. The army took me away from myself and gave me something different.”

  On March 1, the day before his departure, the military held a press conference for its celebrity sergeant. More than one hundred reporters and photographers attended, capturing Elvis’s every word and gesture as his commanding officer presented him with a certificate of merit for “cheerfulness and drive and continually outstanding leadership ability.”

  Nobody but Joe Esposito knew that at that very moment, Elvis had 1,200 pills packed in his luggage, “a box of twelve bottles with a hundred pills in each one.” In Paris, “We’d be out partying all night, then get up and take one of those little pills, and it was great. Elvis was the type who thought you never take just one, because two is even better.”

  Before he left the press conference that day, Elvis ran into an old friend, someone he hadn’t seen since her enlistment in 1957. He hadn’t even known she was in Germany. It was Marion Keisker, his mentor from Sun Records, who still insisted that she, and not Sam Phillips, had really discovered him. She was assistant manager of Armed Forces Television there, a captain under her married name, MacInness.

  She caught him just as he was coming in the door, flanked by M.P.s. It was “like they were taking him to the gallows,” she thought. “He stepped through and I said, ‘Hi, hon,’ and he turned around and his jaw fell. He said, ‘Marion, you’re in Germany and an officer!’ I knew he didn’t know. He said, ‘Do I kiss you or salute you?’ I said, ‘In that order.’ There I was in my uniform and he was in his uniform, and I just flung myself on him.”

  But the only girl he was really thinking of was Priscilla. The countdown to his departure had been hell for both of them, and they clung to each other on that final day, first at the house, and then on the ride to the air base.

  The night before, he told her for the first time that he loved her. “We swore undying fidelity,” she says. But underneath, she was a mass of insecurity. “What was I to think? What was I to believe? He was going back to America where he was [the] biggest star. He was going back to making music and making movies. He was going to appear on the Frank Sinatra [special]. Where did all this leave me?”

  She tried not to worry too much. Hadn’t he given her his combat jacket and his sergeant’s stripes? “Little One,” he said softly, “these prove you belong to me.” Then he got out of the car, waved cheerfully to the crowd, and boarded the plane.

  “He was in love with Priscilla, no two ways about it,” says Joe.

  And it showed. The photographers figured out who she was and snapped her picture as he waved directly to her. Priscilla offered a lonely wave in return, and even in her sorrow, with a scarf wrapped around her head to keep the March wind at bay, her face rivaled that of a Hollywood starlet. She didn’t smile, but she didn’t cry, either. She kept her famous family reserve. And then he was gone.

  But there was a postscript to the story, and it involved Currie Grant and how Suzanne Finstad knew that he was telling the truth in the he said/she said account.

  After Currie had attacked her in the car the second time, Priscilla told Finstad, her parents banned Currie from ever coming anywhere near her. Elvis, too, declared he was no longer part of the group, according to Priscilla. But Currie argued that Priscilla was wrong, that he was still very much a part of the inner circle. Finstad arranged to interview them together, face-to-face, and to record the conversation with their permission, Currie said he brought Priscilla to the air base the day that Elvis flew back to the States. He and Carol had picked her up at her house.

  “You think my father would let you pick me up at the house?” Priscilla countered angrily, as Finstad reported in Child Bride.

  “He was glad to let me pick you up that day,” Currie mocked. “A Life cameraman took all the pictures around my car. I’m standing outside, holding the door. Priscilla, you don’t remember that, huh? You’ve got something up there that’s really blocking your memory.”

  Priscilla soon left, insisting Currie was “in a dream world.”

  Finstad had a scientist, Ray Gunther, put the tape of their conversation through a personality stress evaluator, or PSE, a computerized voice stress test considered more accurate than a polygraph, and used by police departments all over the Unites States. In evaluating twenty-eight points in Currie and Priscilla’s dispute, Gunther concluded that Currie was telling the truth 100 percent of the time, and that Priscilla was deceptive in all but one of her statements, an innocuous one about how Currie originally introduced himself.

  Finstad also discovered that Currie had an almost photographic memory for details. He had even remembered the make, model, and license plate number of the car that he was driving at the time.

  In the course of her research, Finstad found a German magazine, Film Journal, from 1960. The publication chronicled Elvis’s last day in the country in a minute-by-minute account, replete with a little clock in each photograph. There in the magazine was a picture of Currie, opening the door of his 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air for Elvis and Priscilla. Not only did the license plate number match what Currie had told her, but so did the hour.

  “It was literally the smoking gun,” says Finstad. “I didn’t care which one was telling the truth. I simply wanted to know what really happened.”

  In her opinion, Currie’s story doesn’t in any way tarnish Priscilla, she adds. It just makes her more human. She was like every other teenage girl in the world, desperate to make Elvis Presley her own.

  On Wild in the Country, filmed in late 1960 and early 1961, Elvis met actress Tuesday Weld. She called him “dynamite—real dynamite.” Their relationship was often tempestuous. (Robin Rosaaen Collection)

  Chapter Twenty

  “Crazy”

  He arrived at McGuire Air Force Base near Fort Dix, New Jersey, at 7:42 A.M., in the midst of a snowstorm, full of barbiturates to stave off his nervousness about flying. It was still dark that early March morning, and standing in the snow in his dress blues and hat, smiling, waving, and illuminated by hundreds of flashbulbs, Elvis was beyond handsome. He was lean, at 170 pounds, and positively glowing. No actor in Hollywood could have approached his magnificence.

  The army held a full-scale press conference, and on hand to welcome him were the usual parties—the RCA executives, his music publisher Jean Aberbach, as well as Nancy Sinatra, who presented him with two formal, lace-fronted shirts, a gift from her father, Frank.

  The publicity stunt was to billboard his upcoming television special, “Frank Sinatra’s Welcome Home Party for Elvis Presley,” in which a new, cleaned-up, adult Elvis would be presented to the public with an imprimatur from the chairman of the board. It was a slick piece of behind-the-scenes machination by the Colonel, and cam
e together through connections as simple and obvious as the William Morris Agency and as complicated and opaque as Las Vegas mobsters.

  As far as the Colonel was concerned, rock and roll was dead, just like Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, Ritchie Valens, and the careers of Jerry Lee Lewis (who had married his underage cousin) and Little Richard (who had gone into the seminary). It was time for Elvis to move on to the next phase of his life as an all-American hero. That’s what the military years had all been about.

  The reporters had their predictable questions, and Elvis had answers:

  “Have two years of sobering army life changed your mind about rock-and-roll?”

  Sobering army life? No, it hasn’t changed my mind, because I was in tanks for a long time, and they rock and roll quite a bit.

  “Are you apprehensive about what must be a comeback?”

  Yes, I am. I mean, I have my doubts. The only thing I can say is that I’ll be in there fighting.

  “There’s a rumor floating around, Elvis, that you plan to get married soon. Is that true?”

  No, sir. I don’t expect to be a bachelor, sir. I just haven’t found anyone yet that I wanna marry.

  Two years earlier, at a similar press conference in Brooklyn, as he was waiting to board the U.S.S. Randall, a reporter had asked, “Are you leaving any special girl behind to go overseas?”

  Naw sir, not any special one. There’s quite a few of ’em, though. (Laugh)

  And there would continue to be quite a few, starting with three. As Elvis boarded a train two days later that would eventually wind its way home to Memphis, he had Anita and Elisabeth waiting for him in Tennessee, and Priscilla pining away in Germany.

  Priscilla’s stepfather didn’t quite know what to make of it. “It was a very difficult parting,” she said years later. “He saw how I responded to it. I really went into deep depression. I locked myself in my room. I wanted to be in dark places. I didn’t want to go to school. I skipped school. He started realizing there was something wrong with me. I was fourteen at the time, but this was more than a teenager’s crush.”