Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  Still, Elvis had his rules. He sent her home for wearing a pants suit one night. (“Don’t ever wear pants again!”) And she was expected not to date anyone else, though he was free to do as he pleased. That caused a bit of friction. Once Sandy got a little older, she had a date with Wayne Newton, and Elvis saw it in the paper.

  “He pulled this article out and said, ‘Who’s this Fig Newton person?’ He was really upset about that.” Later the two singers met, and one of them mentioned they were dating the same girl. “They came up with the idea to both stop dating me at the same time. It was going to be a joke, but neither one of them did. I continued to date both of them for a very long time.”

  In 1975, Sandy married Wink Martindale, who Elvis had known for more than twenty years. Says Sandy, “I tell my husband he’s the best husband, but Elvis was the best kisser.”

  While Elvis was getting to know Sandy, another fourteen-year-old was thinking of moving on. Elvis and Priscilla were talking on the phone, sometimes all night long, but he had taken three weeks to call her. Her mother had said, “Forget him, honey. It was a lovely chapter in your life, but it’s over.”

  Priscilla apparently thought that way, too. She had already found someone in Weisbaden close to her own age who excited her. Elvis was not the bad boy renegade Priscilla thought he was from his music and movie roles, and that disappointed her. But as Suzanne Finstad wrote in Child Bride, sixteen-year-old Tommy Stewart, a sophomore at H. H. Arnold American Military High School, was the actual embodiment of that and reminded her of the boys she’d been involved with back at Del Valle. He had the look—the black leather jacket, the dark, slicked-back hair—and the intimidation factor. He smoked, he drank, he was a Golden Gloves champion, and “he was not afraid to let people know that he was a sort of dangerous guy,” his friend Tom Muldoon told Finstad.

  Most of all, Tom Stewart was sexually active, and not just with girls at school. He was known to hang out in the rough part of town, on Meinzerstrasse, where prostitution was legal. And he was also known to disappear after school with Priscilla before she even met Elvis. After Elvis returned to the States, she began wearing Tom’s ring on a chain around her neck.

  “She and Tom Stewart had a very physical affair,” says Finstad. “I found Tom after my book came out, and he confirmed all that I had been told. He also said that Priscilla’s mother was so concerned about the depth and the nature of their relationship, that at a certain point, she put Priscilla in a chastity belt before her dates with him.”

  All the time Elvis was phoning Priscilla to discuss his insecurities about his film and music career, his father’s new bride, and all his other extremely adult concerns, “this child,” says Finstad, “and she was a child, really wanted to be out on a motorcycle with Tom. She was having normal and very intense relationships with boys her age, and she was infatuated with them.”

  Her parents objected to the relationships—not just because some of the boys were negative influences on their young daughter, but also because the Beaulieus were now reserving her for Elvis. The boys who came to call told Finstad they got the distinct impression that Priscilla’s family didn’t want them there. Al Corey, who she saw during a brief breakup with Tom, remembered that when he turned up at the Beaulieus, “The parents would say, ‘Our daughter is with Elvis Presley; you need to find someone else.’ ”

  Priscilla, then, was getting pressed from both sides. When Elvis would phone, he used language that was similar to what he had written to Anita. He repeated to her what he had told her on their last day in Germany—he was expecting her to remain “untouched.” If she didn’t, he told her, the next time he saw her, he would know.

  Often after he hung up with Priscilla, Elvis would turn around and call Anita at Graceland (“I stayed with Grandma a lot when he was gone”), where he would spend time with her between movies. Often, too, he would bring her out to Hollywood to keep him company after a long day of shooting. But when that happened, she tended to cramp his style. Better to leave Anita home most of the time. He was running wild, parsing out his heart, being true to nothing and no one.

  Lamar Fike sees it a little differently—that few women complained or left him over his promiscuity. “There was a lot to go around. He wanted to keep everybody happy. It was the lure.”

  On August 1, 1960, Elvis began preproduction work on Flaming Star. Directed by Don Siegel for Twentieth Century-Fox, the film, based on Clair Huffaker’s novel, The Brothers of Broken Lance, appealed to him. After G.I. Blues, he was back to a serious dramatic role, playing Pacer Burton, a half-breed caught between the feuding worlds of his Kiowa Indian mother and white father. But Elvis was disappointed in the decision to place four songs in the film, and director Siegel backed him.

  To Colonel Parker’s chagrin, only two songs remained in the final cut. The title number appeared over the opening credits, and Barbara Eden, who played the ingénue, remembers the other song, “A Cane and a High Starched Collar,” as little more than “Elvis playing guitar and me hopping around the table.”

  Eden was aghast at the Colonel, who set up a desk just inside the soundstage to sell Elvis records and memorabilia to the cast and crew. (“I watched and I did a double take. I couldn’t believe it.”) But she was impressed with Elvis, who wore dark makeup for the role.

  “God, what a talent he was!” Not only was Elvis “a natural on a horse, but like a lot of country entertainers, he had a path to emotional truth. He immediately became that character. He believed what he was doing, and he cared so much about doing a good job. He wanted to please. He had his friends and cousins from Memphis around him on the lot, and his father was there. They sat around in chairs and on boxes and sang a little of this and a little of that. It was very pleasant. Everything was easy with him.”

  They also discussed personal things, beginning with their weight. “We were both watching what we ate. I said, ‘Well, you don’t have a problem. You’re very lean.’ And he said, ‘No, no, my mama was heavy, and I take after her. It shows in my face, so I have to be really careful.’ ”

  But what Elvis wanted to know was how Barbara and her actor husband, Michael Ansara [Broken Arrow], were able to blend marriage and their careers. “I said, ‘It’s not tough at all. It’s our job. We just go our ways and do it.’ He said, ‘I’m really thinking about getting married, but I’m a little worried.’ I said, ‘Oh, have you met someone?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I met this girl. She’s awful young, though. I don’t know.’ ”

  Director Siegel would say that Elvis gave a beautiful performance, but Flaming Star, in which he dies at the end as in Love Me Tender, was not a commercial hit, and a hastily created EP of the two songs, coupled with 1960s smash hits “It’s Now or Never” and “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” peaked at only number fourteen. Coming after G.I. Blues, with its number one soundtrack, it was a disappointment, especially since the Colonel was in negotiations for all of Elvis’s film and recordings contracts. The Mirisch Brothers and United Artists were about to pay him $500,000 plus 50 percent of the profits on each film of a two-picture deal (Follow That Dream, Kid Galahad). This was no time to be screwing things up.

  In May 1960, Elvis took the entourage to Las Vegas so he could introduce the newer members to his favorite getaway. Lately, he’d taken to dressing them all in black mohair suits and sunglasses—an early “Blues Brothers” look, and most certainly his answer to Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack. The press picked up on it and started calling them the Memphis Mafia. The name stuck.

  By now, most of the guys shared Elvis’s fondness for pills—speed, or amphetamines, in the day, and sleeping pills at night. As in Germany, “It didn’t matter if you needed to sleep,” Joe Esposito says. “If he was awake, you had to be awake. That’s just the way it was.” They’d get up in the morning and take uppers and stay up all night, and then finally crash on sleeping pills. “That,” says Joe, “became a vicious routine.”

  One side effect of the pills was that Elvis’s camp became more noisy and di
sruptive at the Beverly Wilshire. Elvis was always breaking boards in his karate practice, and they were staging three-hour pie fights and pouring buckets of water on each other now, not just having squirt gun battles. “One time we came in and water was dripping from the ceiling,” Charlie remembered.

  In a repeat of the Hotel Grunewald incident, it provoked complaints from management and residents alike, especially after Elvis threw an old cheap guitar down the hall, Charlie said, “and a lady looked out and ducked back in, because it went right by her head and broke in all pieces when it hit down there.”

  And so Elvis went searching for a house to rent. In October, he found one at 525 Perugia Way, in the Bel Air section of Beverly Hills, overlooking the Bel Air Country Club. “It was a round house, more or less,” as Charlie put it. “You could walk all the way around the garden inside it. It was unique.” The home was part of the estate of Prince Aly Khan, Pakistan’s representative to the United Nations, who had also been actress Rita Hayworth’s third husband. Rent was $1,400 a month.

  In November, Elvis started production at Twentieth Century-Fox on Wild in the Country, his last shot at challenging movie material. In Clifford Odets’s intelligent script (adapted from the J. R. Salamanca novel The Lost Country), Elvis is a troubled college kid (Glenn Tyler) whose bad temper gets in the way of his gift for writing. As with King Creole, his character teeters between the good girl (Millie Perkins) and the bad (Tuesday Weld), Hope Lange playing the psychiatrist who helps him find his way. With three leading ladies, Elvis was allowed to show his acting range: he was courtly and sweet with Perkins, wild and mischievous with Weld, and wary, then reverential with Lange.

  Millie Perkins, who would go on to play Gladys Presley in the 1990 television series Elvis, was fresh from the title role in The Diary of Anne Frank. She found the offscreen Elvis “very sensitive about who a person was and what they needed. I was very shy and he treated me . . . with such care, like a hothouse flower.”

  Hope Lange, who costarred with Marilyn Monroe in Bus Stop in 1956, and garnered an Oscar nomination for Peyton Place the following year, was a replacement on the project for Simone Signoret, who had become ill. Casting Lange instead of Signoret, director Philip Dunne would say, gave the characters a discrepancy of class more than a discrepancy of age, which worked well with their forbidden sexual pull.

  Lange had never seen Elvis before, except on television, where “I wasn’t that impressed. I thought he was kind of a greaseball. [But] I was surprised. We had a wonderful time. We were always cracking up.”

  Hope was a classy, Connecticut-born lady, but if Elvis feared she’d be too stuffy, she squelched that notion immediately, and he invited her to the house several times for pizza. While her marriage to actor Don Murray was failing—their divorce would be final the following year—Elvis made no moves on her, treating her only with respect. She, in turn, found him charming. According to Alan Fortas, she teased him about having no liquor in the house, which made him stock the bar on Perugia Way and on location in Napa Valley, California. She also got him drinking screwdrivers. When Elvis developed a boil on his rear end (“It hurt so much he couldn’t sit down—he had to just kind of lean on his hip, or lay in a chair,” Alan recalled), the studio sent a doctor to the motel to lance it.

  “What’s the problem?” Hope asked, coming to the room where Elvis was in bed.

  “I got a boil on my ass,” he said, trying to mask his embarrassment.

  “Let me see,” she teased and yanked back the sheets. Alan, Gene, and Joe exploded with laughter, and Elvis turned as red as his boil. His posterior healed, but Elvis’s pride remained wounded. Every few days, Hope would saunter over to him and whisper, “How’s your ass?”

  On location, Elvis secluded himself with blond wardrobe girl Nancy Sharp, whom he’d met on Flaming Star, but the Ivy Leaguer was a little too proper for him. He was more interested in Tuesday Weld, who looked a bit like a blond Priscilla. Although known for precocious, sex kitten roles, Tuesday was as brilliant as she was volatile. At her father’s early death, she became a child model and the family breadwinner, but it proved to be too much. At nine, she had a nervous breakdown, and she began drinking heavily at ten. Two years later, she tried to commit suicide after falling in love with a homosexual. She was seventeen at the time she filmed Wild in the Country.

  Alan Fortas, who had a crush on her, remembered her as being “sweet” to everyone in Elvis’s camp. But Joe Esposito recalls her salty language and recklessness. Before Elvis moved from the Beverly Wilshire, “She decided to chuck a quart of milk out the window of our top-floor suite” just to see it splatter, and got in a shouting match with hotel security when they failed to recognize her. Tuesday also liked to throw things at people from Elvis’s moving car.

  Their romance was apparently hot—Tuesday called him “dynamite, real dynamite”—but harried. “She thought Elvis was very emotionally immature,” says Kevin Eggers, a friend from the early days in Hollywood. “He lost his temper and physically came at her one day, and she just looked back at him and said, ‘You make the mistake of touching me and I’ll put you in the hospital.’ She had a great, funny line about him. She said, ‘You know, Elvis looked better with his clothes on.’ But the simple fact was that one was a bright, talented young woman, and one was a bright, highly talented boy–man. He was never comfortable with a woman. He didn’t have lovers. He had playmates. Once Elvis realized the girl had a mind of her own, it was over. Tuesday had the nerve to talk back.”

  That was part of Elvis’s problem with Christina Crawford—the adopted daughter of screen legend Joan Crawford—who had a small part in the picture. Joe brought her to the house one night, and when he sprung from his seat to light Elvis’s cigar, she knocked it out of his mouth.

  “He shouldn’t have to light your cigar,” Christina huffed.

  “I don’t mind,” Joe said.

  But Elvis, living on amphetamines and pain pills, was incensed and “pulled her by the hair across the coffee table, and ordered her to leave,” Joe wrote.

  Wild in the Country, with four songs, most of them inserted in odd places, fell short of box office expectations. Director Dunne praised Elvis as “an excellent dramatic actor, a natural actor,” but lambasted the Colonel for ruining the film with musical numbers. “I shot them so they could be dropped out, and I wish they would drop them out of the prints now. People would see a good movie.” In preview, the audience, caught up in the story, laughed whenever Elvis started to sing. Author Salamanca called it “a terrible film.”

  Elvis was terrifically depressed and deflated, even during shooting, and knew deep down that the picture would seal the coffin on his hopes to become a serious actor. His resentment toward Parker and the studio heads fueled his drug use and brought dark and brooding changes to his personality. He pulled a four-shot Derringer on a group of kids who mouthed off at him in traffic in San Francisco on a weekend trip, and soon he would display other aberrant behavior. Joe and Lamar started calling him by a new nickname, “Crazy.”

  Later that year, Barbara Hearn got a call from someone in Elvis’s inner circle, asking if she would come out to Graceland. Barbara hadn’t seen Elvis since Gladys’s death, and when she arrived, he was sitting around downstairs with his new pack of friends. She was saddened at their interaction: “Whatever he would say, everybody would agree with him.”

  They were talking about his next picture, Blue Hawaii, which would be choreographed by Charles O’Curran, the husband of singer Patti Page.

  As Barbara remembers it, “Elvis said, ‘Patti Page is the best female singer,’ and everybody said yes, she was the best female singer. Then he looked at me and grinned, and I said, ‘No.’ And he laughed and he said, ‘Well, you can count on Barbara to disagree with everybody. Who do you think is the greatest female singer?’ I said, ‘I like Peggy Lee better than anybody else.’ I thought she was a much better musician. She wrote great songs, and I just liked her style. So we had a big discussion about Pegg
y Lee versus Patti Page. But in a few minutes, it was back to the same old thing, so I went upstairs and called Mother and asked if she would come get me.”

  Elvis followed her up as she was hanging up the phone.

  “Why are you leaving?”

  “Well, honestly, I’m just not having a good time.”

  His face fell, and then he said, “Neither am I.”

  But it was his house, she told him. “You can do something about it.”

  “We talked until Mother came, and she was very touched because he just hugged and hugged her, and kissed her on the cheek. Later, she said, ‘I think he knew that was the last time we would ever see each other.’ And I said, ‘I think he did, too.’ ”

  It would be another sixteen years before Barbara would see him, and then only onstage. When she left Graceland that day, she cordoned off a part of her life.

  If Elvis had just lost a vital female connection, he made another through a chance encounter. In the fall of 1960, the man who had been out of the housing projects only seven years bought a black Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud II. He was driving down Santa Monica Boulevard one night and caught the eye of seventeen-year-old Patti Parry, who was on her way to a fraternity party with a girlfriend. That one minute in time changed her life.

  “Let’s go see who’s in that Rolls-Royce,” she said to her friend and pulled her old clunker of a Buick next to him at a red light. Patti, who was going to beauty school, had been born in the Stamford Hill section of London, England, but she’d been in the States since she was ten, and she knew the drill in L.A. “It’s Elvis Presley,” she said. “Pretend we don’t know who he is.”

  He rolled down the window.

  “Hey, girls. Hi!”

  Patti played it cool.

  “You look familiar,” she deadpanned. “Do I know you from somewhere?”

  Elvis laughed and said, “Pull over!”

  He knew she knew who he was, and he liked being noticed—liked the looks on people’s faces when they saw him out in public.