Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  Elvis instructed her to write to him on pink stationery, so Joe Esposito could pick her letters out of the endless sacks of mail.

  The media asked about her at Elvis’s Memphis press conference, held March 7, 1960, in Vernon’s office just behind Graceland. Some fifty reporters crammed into the small room, where Elvis, dressed with a new European flair in all dark clothes, his hair still a muted blond (he would dye it Cadillac black four days later), sat at his father’s desk and swiveled nervously in the chair. He had been awake all night on the train, getting in just before 8 A.M., in the middle of another snowstorm. He looked weary, but boyish.

  “Now, gentlemen,” he announced in mock seriousness, “I have called you here to discuss a very important matter.” Everybody laughed. He swiveled some more, looked down, dealt with his emotions.

  “I just can’t get it in my mind that I’m here,” he said, looking almost dazed. And then the questions flew: about the music, about the movies (he had three to do that year, and would soon start G.I. Blues), even about his tonsillitis. And then they got down to business.

  “How about any romance . . . did you leave any hearts, shall we say, in Germany?”

  Elvis, clearly uncomfortable, grinned, glanced away, and looked altogether like a man who’d just been caught doing something he shouldn’t. Then he laughed and broke out in nervous titters as he attempted to answer the question. “Not any special one, no. There was one little girl that I was seeing quite often over there. Her father was in the air force. Actually, they only got over there [a few] months before I left. I was seeing her and she was at the airport when I left. And there were some pictures made of her [laughs]. But it was no big . . . it was no big romance. I mean the stories came out, ‘The Girl He Left Behind’ [laughs], and all that. It wasn’t like that, I mean [laughs]. I have to be careful when I answer a question like that [laughs].”

  Soon, it was over. “You’ll never know how happy I am to be here,” he said, his voice full of feeling. “Somebody asked me this morning, ‘what did I miss about Memphis?’ And I said, ‘Everything.’ ”

  That evening, he saw Anita, who he’d asked to wait at his cousin Patsy’s house, so they could have a private reunion, apart from his family. “There’ll be no one else in the room but just us,” he’d told her. But he couldn’t stand not seeing her and had her come on out with everyone there anyway.

  “He was standing right there in the doorway of the music room where the piano was. He said, ‘Little . . .’ And I just ran over there to him. I was glad to see him. [And] I guess he was glad to see me. We just embraced for a while. Quite a while. It was a really good time, happy time.”

  In a month, she would dye her hair black to match his, using his new color, Miss Clairol 51 D, “Black Velvet.” And he would buy her a diamond necklace. But still, he could not be entirely faithful. He was already seeing nineteen-year-old Bonnie Bunkley, who had come to the house with her voice teacher, collecting money for a benefit for Whitehaven High School.

  It seemed to be a compulsion for him, and Elisabeth Stefaniak could not stand it a minute longer. He had bought a yellow Lincoln for her to use, and even gave her driving lessons himself. He had taken her for motorcycle rides and ensconced her in Graceland to help with the incessant flow of mail. But he had also visited the Holiday on Ice show to see the female skaters he had met in Germany, and then invited the whole cast home. And she had covered for him with Anita about his behavior in Germany. However, she could not be his occasional girlfriend, not when there would always be so many others. She was still in love with him, but she needed someone who wanted only her.

  On March 15, barely two weeks after her arrival, Elisabeth left Graceland, saying she was going to Florida to see her family. Instead, she went to meet Rex’s parents. Secretly, she and Rex had decided to marry. It had been Rex who had introduced Elisabeth to Elvis, and now it was Rex who was taking her away.

  The suggestion had come largely from Minnie Mae, back in Germany. Rex knew better than to hit on one of Elvis’s girls, but Grandma had said, “I want you to do it.” It showed her love for both of them and her disdain for how her grandson treated the girl.

  The night before Rex and Elisabeth ran off, Rex went to Elvis and told him he’d thought about what it would be like to work for him, but he was going to go back to his old job. Elvis said he understood and wished him luck.

  He had rented out the Memphian that night, and Rex was helping him get ready. “Elvis was looking into the big walled mirror at himself,” Rex wrote in his memoir. “I was directly behind him, helping him with his tuxedo suspenders.”

  “Elvis,” he said, “would you mind if I took Elisabeth out on a date tonight?”

  For a minute, Elvis said nothing. Rex held his breath. “Clearly a nerve had been struck,” Rex wrote.

  “Rexadus, you know Elisabeth will never love anybody but me,” Elvis said, his voice steely. Then he switched gears. “Heck, I’m glad you’re taking her out. I know I can count on you to treat her like a lady.”

  That summer, they sent him an invitation to their wedding. But he didn’t come, and they never saw him again.

  It was a confusing time for Elvis. He was home, but home wasn’t really home anymore. His mother was gone. He had driven out to see the marker and the big stone angels on her grave the day after he got back to Memphis, and he placed a standing order with Burke’s Florist to deliver fresh flowers there once a week. But he found it hard to return to the cemetery himself. It was just too painful. “He didn’t seem like Elvis ever again,” his Aunt Lillian observed. “He was depressed. He’d say, ‘I can’t go to the cemetery, Aunt Lillian. I can’t hardly pass there.’ ”

  To make things worse, Vernon was converting the three-car garage into an apartment for himself and Dee and her boys. Elvis and Anita were out by the swimming pool the day Vernon moved Dee in. “Daddy,” Anita remembers Elvis saying, “are you sure you want to do this? Why do you want to do this?”

  Anita felt for Elvis. It was hard to watch him struggle with the idea of another woman occupying the house he had bought for Gladys. “Eventually, the two of them moved into Mr. and Mrs. Presley’s old bedroom. That wasn’t very good, either. Elvis didn’t like that a bit.”

  When Vernon and Dee married in Alabama that July, Elvis was noticeably absent. “She seems pretty nice,” Elvis told the Memphis Press-Scimitar. “I only had one mother and that’s it. There’ll never be another. As long as she understands that, we won’t have any trouble.”

  In April, Elvis and his entourage, which now included new members Joe Esposito, Charlie Hodge, and Red West’s younger cousin, Sonny, headed for California to make G.I. Blues for Paramount. Producer Hal Wallis had visited his star in Germany to soak up the ambience for Elvis’s first musical comedy, in which he would play a romanticized version of himself. As Tulsa McLean, a singing army specialist stationed in West Germany, Elvis accepts a bet that he can romance a chilly cabaret dancer, Lili, played by the well-cast Juliet Prowse.

  Unlike his prearmy films, which were based on previously published novels or stories, G.I. Blues was written for the screen and follows a predictable and formulaic storyline. Elvis makes the best of the tepid script, in which he babysits an infant and sings at a children’s puppet show. But the film telegraphs only ominous things about his future screen persona. Gone are the swiveling hips, the sideburns, the songs of sexual undertow, and Elvis the rebel. In his place is a clean-cut, harmless, and conservative Elvis, designed to appeal to middle America. G.I. Blues would serve as the prototype for all the Presley musicals to come. From here on out, the public Elvis would become much more what people thought he should be.

  Offscreen, he was not nearly so neutered, as he pursued three actresses on the film, Juliet Prowse, Leticia Roman, and a bit player, Judy Rawlins. He had more success with Juliet and Judy, the Italian-born Leticia, nineteen, telling the press, “He kept asking me to go out with him, but I tell him, ‘No. I don’t think it would be a good idea. It would
seem too much like a publicity date.’ Besides, I don’t think my parents would approve.”

  Juliet was not his usual physical type—the South African dancer-actress was just under six feet tall, and she originally snubbed him on the set. (“Man, I’ll tell you, that is one cold chick,” Elvis remarked to Sonny West.) But part of her appeal lay in the fact that she was the girlfriend of Frank Sinatra, who had just devoted his Timex special to spotlighting Elvis’s return from the army, the two trading songs (Elvis sang “Witchcraft,” Frank sang “Love Me Tender”) in a generational détente.

  Just like his character in the film, Elvis was determined to win Juliet over, and carried their love scenes far beyond director Norman Taurog’s cries of “cut.” After a while, Taurog called him over. “You don’t have to put your heart and soul into it,” he said. “How can you help but put your heart and soul into this?” Elvis answered, defrosting the ice queen. “A few days being around him, she just wore right down,” says Sonny. “She started cutting up with us.”

  Soon he and Juliet began spending time in his portable dressing room. Red and Sonny teased him, repeatedly knocking on the trailer door and saying, “Frank’s coming, Elvis!”

  “Elvis would open that door and say, ‘Where is he?’, and we would just run off laughing,” says Sonny. Then one day Sinatra showed up for real. Red went over to that door and whispered, “Elvis, Elvis, here comes Frank, man! I promise you.”

  “Get away from that door, Red.”

  “I mean it. I can’t talk too loud or he will hear, man. I can’t say any more.”

  “Frank came up and introduced himself, very nice,” Sonny remembers. “He said, ‘Hi. Is Elvis in?’ And we said, ‘Yes, sir, he’s going over his dialogue.’ Frank knocked on the door, and thankfully Elvis had heard his voice, so when he opened it, Juliet was sitting there prim and proper with her script, and Elvis had his script in his hand like they were going over lines. He said, ‘Well, hey Frank!’ And Juliet said, ‘Hi, darling!’ Everything was fine, and she left and went to lunch with him. Afterward, Elvis said, ‘You sons of guns, you almost cost me there!’ ”

  Their lovemaking was fierce and intense. “He said Juliet liked to grab her ankles and spread her legs real wide,” reports Lamar. And Juliet would sit on the floor at friends’ houses and just hug herself, she was so smitten with him. (“He’s really one of the most sincere people in the most insincere town on earth,” she said.) But Elvis dropped her after a few dressing room encounters—not because she was Frank’s girl, but because he saw her as smarter and more sophisticated than he, which made him uncomfortable.

  Their friendship, however, remained, and she played it cool in interviews: “He had a wonderful sense of humor . . . I remember thinking at the time it must be very hard to be him. . . . He had a suite up at the Beverly Wilshire and he couldn’t leave because the place would be surrounded by girls.”

  According to Byron Raphael, around this same time, Elvis had a momentary brush with a far more intimidating Hollywood star, Marilyn Monroe. Lamar, of all people, had already chatted up the screen goddess at a party. But Elvis had never seen her. Then in the early summer of 1960, the two most explosive and legendary sex symbols of their era sized each other up in the street in front of a soundstage at Twentieth Century-Fox and came away unnerved, if not befuddled.

  Marilyn, who was reeling both from her fractious marriage to celebrated playwright Arthur Miller and from her affair with actor-singer Yves Montand, was costarring with the latter in Let’s Make Love, then in production at Fox. Elvis was due to start principal photography on the period western Flaming Star there in August, and two months earlier, reported to the studio for wardrobe.

  Byron said he was with Elvis, Cliff, and Gene (who now hoped to pursue a movie career under the name “El Gino Stone”) when the guys began goading him. They were sitting in Elvis’s dressing room on the lot. “Man, you gotta meet Marilyn Monroe,” Gene started. “Elvis, you’ve got to ask Marilyn out!”

  “No,” he said, seeing Marilyn in a league of her own. “She won’t talk to me.” Cliff, who would soon be fired over a minor dispute, pushed him harder: “Elvis, man, you’re a star! You’ve gotta take the bull by the horns. It’s Marilyn Monroe! You’ve gotta be forceful!”

  Finally the guys talked Elvis into taking his chances, Byron recalled, “and somehow we found out Marilyn’s soundstage. Then the four of us made our way over on bicycles.”

  They almost missed her: Marilyn, dressed in a bathrobe and looking distraught, her hair all askew, was suddenly in front of them, coming out of stage twenty-three. Elvis approached her in his usual self-deprecating way, his soft baritone edged in southern charm. “Hello, my name is Elvis Presley. How are you, Miss Monroe?”

  “Marilyn smiled in a way that said she liked the way Elvis filled out his Oxxford trousers,” Byron wrote in Playboy. “But then her face fell as she took in his companions: Gene, the most pathetic yokel who ever hit Hollywood, and the always embarrassing Cliff, a smooth operator who was so oily he practically left stains when he walked.

  “Monroe, forever insecure, had been searching for class in her choices of husband Miller and lover Montand, and the sight of Elvis’s barely civilized friends launched an unmistakable look of fear and disgust. Marilyn’s famous suitor, oblivious to her reaction, began his roundabout way of asking for a date, mentioning a party at the Beverly Wilshire and inviting her to come.

  “ ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I can’t,’ ” she declined in a breathy rush. She wasn’t feeling well, she said—a headache from some kind of allergy—and promptly pulled a bottle of pills from her purse.”

  Elvis was relieved. But he took something from the encounter after all, Byron said. “As a studio aide offered Marilyn a cup of water, I spotted the physician’s name—Dr. Hyman Engelberg—on the prescription label. Elvis did, too. A few weeks later, he had his own scrip from the good doctor in his dressing room.”

  During the making of G.I. Blues, Elvis was much more comfortable in the company of a younger female, and if things had turned out differently, Priscilla Beaulieu might never have seen Elvis Presley again.

  He spent his evenings at a restaurant-nightclub in Panorama City called the Crossbow, where Red knew a white rhythm-and-blues singer from Louisiana named Lance LeGault. The club was popular with celebrities, since they could sit unnoticed in the balcony and watch the dancing below. One night, Elvis, then twenty-five, was talking with the owner, Tony Ferra, and noticed a picture of Tony’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Sandy, in his office. Elvis said he’d like to meet her, and Tony called and got his sable-haired child on the line. Sandy would remember it was nine-thirty, while her mother, Mary Lou, fixed the time at more like 2 A.M.

  Elvis and Sandy chatted for a few minutes, and then he asked the teenager if she could come to the club.

  “No,” Sandy said. “I’ve got to go to sleep.” The girl had school the next day, and her mother refused to drive her up.

  Mary Lou took the phone. “I said, ‘Elvis, she’s only fourteen.’ But then he kept buggin.’ He called again and again. He kept coming to the club until the night I said, ‘I will bring her up.’ ”

  The evening Mary Lou made good on her promise, Elvis was there with a date, Kathy Kersch, who was just breaking into show business and would be crowned Miss Rheingold beer queen of 1962. Sandy remembers Kathy was “gorgeous,” but to her surprise, it was Sandy’s hand Elvis held all night. Mary Lou was perplexed. “He was paying all of the attention to my daughter. And I’m thinking, ‘Gee, she’s only fourteen. What’s his problem?’ ”

  Soon they were dancing and making out, nothing more, Sandy says, though even that turned into a problem. “In school the next day I’d be embarrassed, because my face would be so raw. But when he would hold me in his arms, it was like, ‘If I died now, it would be okay.’ ”

  Mary Lou accompanied them on their first date and then insisted on tagging along for the next two, according to Sandy. “He loved my mom.” But Elvis continue
d to puzzle the older woman. One night at the Beverly Wilshire, Elvis and Mary Lou sat in the kitchen, Elvis telling her about Gladys and talking about cooking, among other subjects, while Sandy watched TV.

  “I want to ask you something and maybe you will do it,” he said. “I would like for you and your daughter to move to Graceland.”

  “You’re kidding! Why?”

  “Well, you said you want to be with her. I’d like to have her at Graceland.”

  “She’s too young right now, Elvis.”

  “That’s all right. I’m not going to do anything. I just want to raise her. I want her to be there as my wife.”

  Mary Lou went home and told her husband. “Oh boy, he raised the roof! He went crazy! He started cursing and yellin’. I said, ‘That’s all right. I’m against it, too.’ ”

  Sandy would end up dancing in a number of Elvis’s films (Viva Las Vegas; Easy Come, Easy Go; Double Trouble, and The Trouble with Girls), and go on dance auditions just so she could see him. She won the part in Viva Las Vegas on her own, with no help from him. “Elvis was quite surprised when he saw me on the set. During one of the scenes, he kept bumping my butt with his. He really got off on that.

  “I was making $100, $150 a day. We would have lunch together.” A lot of days, she would get paid just for sitting there and eating with him. “What a great life for a young girl!”

  Their romance lasted six years, up until the time he became engaged, she says. Mostly, they went to the movies or sat around and ate pizzas, since Elvis had early wake-up calls on the set. “We would kiss for hours, and dance for hours, and watch television, and sit at the piano and sing. We had an awful lot of fun.” But all through it, “There were no expectations on either of our parts.”