Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

The show, in Honolulu’s Bloch Arena, where the audience never stopped shrieking, “not for one minute,” according to Joan Blackman, raised more than $62,000. Elvis, wearing the jacket to his gold lamé suit, was both energized and uninhibited. At twenty-six, he was also at his physical peak, looking lean, hard, and well tanned, after producer Wallis issued strict orders through Colonel Parker that his star get in shape, watch his weight, and use a sun lamp.

  Colonel Parker had booked country comic Minnie Pearl as an opening act for the show, but until they landed at the Honolulu International Airport, she hadn’t realized “how encapsulated Elvis was in his fame.” As three thousand screaming females rushed to surround the plane, “I began to get these chilling feelings that maybe I didn’t want to be all that close to Elvis—the fans were all along the route he was taking to the [Hawaiian Village] hotel, and my husband was afraid that we’d be trampled trying to get inside. I felt myself being lifted completely off my feet by all these people.”

  On the afternoon following the show, Minnie, aka Sarah Cannon, joined some of the musicians down on Waikiki Beach, “cavorting and kidding and having a big time. We got to talking about how we wished Elvis could come down and be with us, and we turned and looked up at his penthouse, which was facing the ocean. He was standing on the balcony, looking down at us, this solitary figure, lonely-looking, watching us have such a good time. He was literally a prisoner because of the fans. We sat there on the beach and talked about how it would be—what a price you pay for that sort of fame.”

  Elvis had a different experience from the balcony when nineteen-year-old cast member Darlene Tompkins visited his penthouse. “His buddies had gone out onto the wide patio which overlooked the beach, and they started yelling to him, ‘Elvis, come out here, some of the girls on the beach want to see you!’

  “I realized he was ignoring them, and I finally said, ‘Elvis, those are your fans. You really should go out there and let them see you.’ He hesitated and then said, ‘I probably shouldn’t.’ Whereupon I asked, ‘Well, why not?’ He kind of sighed for a second and then said, ‘Okay, come on out here with me, and I’ll show you what always happens.’

  “The two of us walked out onto the patio, and an immediate cheer went up from the crowd of people, mostly beautiful young women. No sooner had we gotten to the railing before a number of the young females began taking their bikini bathing suit tops off and waving them around in the air, while the ones wearing one-piece suits pulled their tops down, trying to catch his attention. Elvis immediately yelled, ‘Come on now, girls, don’t do that,’ which was quickly met by a resounding, ‘Keep doing it! Keep doing it!’ from Elvis’s guy friends. Elvis looked sheepishly at me and in an embarrassed tone, said, ‘That’s what the girls always do.’ ”

  Darlene, who played one of the teenagers, had first run into him in the hallway of the hotel, where he said, “Hi, how are you?” in “a very soft, friendly voice.” She doesn’t remember what either of them said after that because, “I was so nervous and my legs were so wobbly I was afraid I was going to fall to the floor right there in front of him. I just remember thinking as we stood there chatting, ‘I can’t believe how beautiful he is, more so than in any picture I’ve ever seen of him.’ It was an experience I’ll never forget.”

  Later, they expanded their friendship to kissing, though Elvis also became interested in Pamela Austin (then billed as Pamela Kirk), who played another of the students on tour with their teacher, and who would also appear in a later Elvis movie, Kissin’ Cousins.

  His more intense love interest was his scripted girlfriend, Joan Blackman, who bore a slight resemblance to both his mother and to Priscilla, Joe Esposito thought. Joan understood the attraction: “He was always looking for someone with black hair and blue eyes, and I had that naturally.” She was cast in Blue Hawaii only eleven days before shooting, replacing Juliet Prowse, who made too many demands for Hal Wallis’s liking. The day she walked on the set, Joan says, Elvis approached her and said, “Man, you’re beautiful.” Joe counts their romance as one of Elvis’s “real relationships,” though it was brief.

  “We had rooms next to each other in the hotel, and for weeks we just about lived together,” she has said. But she was serious about her work. “If it came to a toss-up between meeting Elvis for dinner or getting my sleep because of having to be on the set the next day, my work always won.” She also objected to the entourage: “It’s hard to talk with eight people at a time and really relate.”

  Joan, who had competed in beauty contests as a young child and began singing and dancing professionally at age eleven, claims to have met Elvis at Paramount in 1957 and dated him for a year before he went into the army.

  “There was something between us . . . he had really liked me [when I knew him before], and some of that rekindled on the set. Had I not been dating someone else at the time we filmed, things could have gotten serious between us.”

  Blue Hawaii, for all its lush tropical settings and sentimental romance, was not a particularly fun movie to shoot, Joan says, as Hal Wallis “was not the kind of person that you had a good time with. Our sets were very serious. . . . In certain dialogue scenes Elvis was very nervous. He used to hold my hand until I thought he’d never let me go.”

  To break up the tension, whenever something went wrong on the set, particularly if one of the guys accidentally ruined a take, Elvis would cup his hands around his mouth and mimic a loudspeaker: “Flight 247, now leaving from Honolulu to Memphis, with Charlie Hodge on board.”

  “He needed to do stuff like that because he was not at ease in front of the camera,” in Joan’s estimation.

  On the other hand, Joan thought that Elvis was too passive. He rarely asked to change dialogue that he found difficult. And unlike in his prearmy films, he usually accepted direction he didn’t agree with rather than question it.

  “It takes a lot of courage to take a chance and fight for it, to say, ‘I want this.’ I don’t think he could handle that. He didn’t want to make waves.”

  Joe Esposito blames it on Elvis’s military experience and his renewed respect for authority.

  “The army calmed him down, but it hurt him more than it helped him, because it tamed him too much. When he came out, he became more oriented to do what he was told. And because of his upbringing, he could never stand up to a person who was older than he was. He could scream and yell and chew us out, but he was taught to always respect his elders. That hurt him in his career. He should have said, ‘This is what I want to do. Let’s try it, and if it doesn’t work, I’ll understand.’ That’s why he made so many mediocre movies.”

  He particularly put too much trust in director Taurog, Joan thought, as well as other directors down the line. Had he gone along with some of his own instincts, “He might have done some different kind[s] of films.”

  Blue Hawaii, Elvis’s first bikini picture, followed the musical format of G.I. Blues—fourteen songs in all, three more than even its model. But it easily surpassed it at the box office, and quickly recouped its $2 million budget. In placing Elvis in an exotic locale, and wedding a plethora of romance to nonstop music—the film’s biggest hit, “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” fell just short of number one, and the soundtrack topped the charts, selling two million copies in the first year alone—Wallis had perfected his winning Presley formula. The popularity of Blue Hawaii doomed Elvis’s chances of ever returning to serious dramatic fare, and only rarely did he even attempt to venture beyond the film’s stifling structure.

  Nearly all the Elvis movies produced after the release of Blue Hawaii would be assembled around his personality—or Hollywood’s conception of it—just as films had once been fashioned around such female stars as Mae West and Shirley Temple. The Wallis productions were the last Hollywood vehicles guaranteed to pull a reliable gross solely because of their star. This led the producer himself to remark, “A Presley picture is the only sure thing in show business.”

  Elvis’s next film, Follow That Dream, fo
r United Artists, also sent him to a sunny clime, this time to Crystal River, Florida. Based on Richard Powell’s novel Pioneer, Go Home, and produced by David Weisbart (Love Me Tender), the film attempted to meld comedy and social satire. But in failing to capture the humor of rural southerners, director Gordon Douglas ended up with something akin to a “Li’l Abner” cartoon, an embarrassing mishmash of a movie about a blended family, welfare, and homesteading.

  Still, there were highlights. “Elvis was really good in that film,” in the estimation of his costar, Anne Helm. “I thought he was a wonderful actor. He had a scene where we were in a courtroom, and they had hired all the townspeople to be extras. . . . He turned to them and gave a very emotional speech about why the children should not be taken away from us. He was so believable that he had the townspeople in tears. It was interesting to see, because I had never thought about him as an actor.”

  When Elvis learned that he would be spending nearly three weeks in Florida, he sent word to Jackie Rowland, his Jacksonville sweetheart, asking her to come to him. She was nineteen now, but her mother still frowned on her friendship with Elvis and had refused Gladys’s invitation to visit Graceland. Now Marguerite waffled on whether she would let her daughter go to Crystal River. (“You will go when I will take you.”) By the time they finally arrived, says Jackie, “Elvis had gone, and left a message that he couldn’t wait for me any longer. I knew at that point that it was a hopeless cause for the two of us.” Never again would she receive an invitation from him, though he would have RCA send her albums into the 1970s.

  Elvis had his hands full of women in Crystal River as it was. He was romancing both of his costars, the voluptuous, Toronto-born Helm and the southern beauty Joanna Moore.

  Of the two, he had an easier time with the down-to-earth Helm, whom he allowed to “become one of the guys” and join his poker games with the Memphis Mafia. “I lost money. One time I had to write a check to Elvis to cover my loss. He didn’t cash that check for a long time.”

  In many ways, her character mirrored Elvis’s fantasies about Sandy Ferra and Priscilla Beaulieu. As Holly Jones, Anne played a live-in orphan who grows up under Elvis’s protective eye, maturing from a scrawny teen to a young woman. “You know anything about sex, Holly?” his character asks.

  “I really fell for Elvis, I mean, who wouldn’t? We did have a romance, and it was quite wonderful.” She wrote poetry about him during the day, and at night, they went for drives in his Cadillac, flying through silhouetted palms and scrub oak along State Road 40, Elvis fiddling with the radio dial.

  “It was so strange when ‘Hound Dog’ would come on, and there I was, sitting next to him.” The evenings usually ended up with more than a romantic drive, though. “He really liked sex. A lot of nights I didn’t go back to my own bungalow. I felt a little ashamed about it the next morning, because I knew that the people on the set realized what was going on.” At the same time, “I had fun. And it was special.”

  Though she had been a showgirl at New York’s Copacabana nightclub, she hadn’t realized the extent of Elvis’s fame until she accompanied him to Weeki Wachee Springs, Florida, on July 30, 1961, for a special ceremony honoring his achievements. There, the Colonel, reliving his Florida carnival days, arranged for a mermaid show of what the ol’ hustler dubbed the Elvis Presley Underwater Fan Club.

  Thousands of people showed up, “and they were behind a wire fence to keep them away from him, because they were crazed,” Helm remembers. “I was really overwhelmed by it, because I’d never seen such madness for someone.” She was equally surprised that Elvis stayed and signed autographs for several hours. “I was so touched by that. He really revered his fans. He was lovely with them.” They brought out all “the sweetness and cream in him,” she thought, watching him walk along the fence, talking with people.

  She continued to see him when they returned to California, but she found it more difficult to date him there, where he no longer knocked on her door and brought her flowers, and where his parties consisted of carpet-to-carpet women, mostly young girls. One night at the piano, he said something to her that angered her, and she pulled the piano lid down on his hands. It hurt his finger, and “He was really mad, for the first time, at me.” She apologized, but it didn’t seem to help, and the next day, she went out and bought a gag gift, a big rubber thumb, and sent it to him with a note. Still, “I never heard from him again.”

  She knew to give up and to cherish what now seemed like a shipboard romance in Florida. In California, “He had many lives, he had many women around him. It wasn’t like Crystal River, where I had him all to myself every night.”

  But that was only because Elvis had become frightened of Joanna Moore. According to Joe Esposito, her reputation for promiscuity preceded her on the Follow That Dream set, and “sure enough, they went off together.” The affair was short-lived, however, because Elvis found her strange and emotionally fragile. She spoke in a voice that was both high-pitched and tense, and she was far too effusive with both the guys and with Elvis, declaring her love for him almost immediately. When she became clingy, he quickly moved on to Anne.

  However, when filming resumed in California, Joanna was not to be ignored. She showed up at Elvis’s door late one night, looking terrible, “as if she’d just climbed out of bed,” Joe remembered. Slurring her words, she demanded to see Elvis. When Joe told her Elvis was asleep, she began crying and tried to force her way into the house. She passed out in Joe’s and Charlie’s arms, and after Charlie got a wet cloth and revived her, Joe asked her what could be so important that couldn’t wait until morning.

  “Elvis got me pregnant,” she moaned. “And I took a bunch of sleeping pills. I have to talk to him!”

  Charlie and Joe took her to the UCLA Emergency Room, where doctors pumped her stomach. The next morning, the guys told Elvis what had happened.

  “Make sure you call and find out how she’s doing today,” he said. “I knew that girl had problems. That’s why I stopped seeing her.”

  As for the pregnancy, Joe says, the doctors saw no evidence of it.

  On his next picture, Kid Galahad, a remake of the 1937 boxer film of the same title, Elvis was once more romantically paired with Joan Blackman. He had requested her on the film, but by the time it went into production, he was also involved with twenty-three-year-old Connie Stevens, who he’d seen in the Hawaiian Eye television series. As soon as he asked her out, “I knew,” she says, “this was a fellow who could break your heart.” Still, she couldn’t resist him: “He was just so beautiful. He had mischievous eyes that darted around the room.”

  She saw him on and off for two years. “I really cared about him. I cared what happened to his life.” And so she worked on him to find a way to live a more normal existence, to not be so isolated and such a prisoner of fame. He no longer walked around with a wallet. (“Elvis never carried a dime in his pocket, no matter where he went,” says Joe.) And when it came to women, it was as if he had forgotten how to date. As for being mobbed, once he got past the gate girls, who waited all day and night for him to come out, surely he could just go to dinner and a movie in the film star capital of the world, couldn’t he?

  “He finally listened to me long enough, and we went to Grauman’s Chinese [Theatre], and I thought, ‘I’ll never put this guy through this again.’ I remember Joe put money in his pocket, and he was nervous as hell. And we went out in the car, and he wore his favorite cap, and we ran out of gas. He was just panic-stricken. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll push this car.’ ”

  They managed to get the car into a gas station, but as he had done in Germany, he missed the beginning of the picture, because he was afraid too many people would recognize him going in, and he missed the end of the picture, so they could get out without being bothered.

  “Sure enough, we got out into the car and we were going home, laughing about the whole night, and he went to reach for his favorite cap, and it was gone. That was so typical, people wanting a piece of him all of
the time.”

  Connie wanted something too, of course: She wanted a part of Elvis’s heart. “But one of the things I knew instinctively was that he probably couldn’t be captured, and shouldn’t be captured, because he was so special that he needed to be in the world. He was a very dear, precious person.”

  Of all the men she dated—she would later marry Eddie Fisher—Elvis was her father’s favorite. “He was one of the loves of my life,” she admits. “I could have spent a lifetime with him. And I knew it was never to be.” Not only were the other women a problem, she says, but to be with him, “you had to follow the crowd.” Like Joan Blackman, “I got tired of going out with eleven guys for dinner.”

  By spring 1962 the entourage included Joe, Gene, Lamar, Alan, Billy, and Ray “Chief” Sitton. Sonny, Red, and Charlie were still part of the Mafia, though they all sought independent work, Sonny and Red in Hollywood, and Charlie with country singer Jimmy Wakely. Cliff would continue to be hired and fired with regularity, and Lamar would soon be gone, though only temporarily, after a blowup with Elvis.

  Patti still worked her hairdressing job, but she went wherever Elvis was three days a week and remained a fixture at the house whenever he was in California. And Marty Lacker, who had first started coming up to Graceland in 1957 but had just now officially joined the group, would weave in and out in the early 1960s. Marty would quickly develop a fondness for pills, mostly downers to round off the high ends of his intensity.

  Elvis now began traveling cross-country in a 1962 Dodge motor home, replete with double bed, two bunks, a kitchen, and air-conditioning. He paid in excess of $10,000 for it and planned to have George Barris, “Customizer to the Stars,” who’d transformed Elvis’s 1960 Cadillac limousine into a “solid gold,” Vegas-ready extravaganza, add the finishing touches.

  And there were other changes. At the end of 1961, Elvis decided he’d outgrown the Perugia Way house—neighbors complained that the girls out front made the place look like a male bordello—and moved to another rental property, an elegant Italian villa just around the corner at 10539 Bellagio Road. The mansion was “very grand,” says Joe, and came with a butler.