by Alanna Nash
They had been there only a few days, according to Alan Fortas, when Elvis mourned the fact that he hadn’t brought along the source of much of his fun on Perugia Way—a two-way mirror, which he used to spy on the guys and their dates in the den. It was small, maybe three feet by two feet, but it fed Elvis’s growing interest in voyeurism, and the guys loved it, too, even if the women didn’t. Tuesday Weld came over one time and looked through it and called them all a bunch of adolescents.
On Bellagio Road, Sonny got the idea to install a new mirror in the cabana, where female guests changed from their street clothes into their bathing suits. It was huge—the size of a picture window, five by five—but it worked only at the back of the cabana, which meant the guys had to crawl under the house to see anything. The first time girls came over for a swim, Alan was surprised to see Elvis with dirt on his cheeks and a big smear across his forehead.
“I can’t believe you crawled under there. Hell, Elvis, they’ll let you look!”
Elvis thought about it for a second. “Yeah,” he said, “but it’s a lot more fun this way.”
The Bellagio Road home was the scene of many memorable parties, particularly as Elvis had recently acquired a forty-pound chimpanzee named Scatter, the retired star of a children’s TV show in Memphis. He was a perfect party animal, since he naturally gravitated toward women, sticking his head up girls’ skirts, unbuttoning their blouses, and hiding behind the bathroom door to scare the wits out of them.
The first time Patti Parry came over after Elvis brought Scatter out to California, he came in the room screeching, with his hands up, every hair standing on end, and Patti thought he was going to attack her. Scatter only wanted to look up her skirt, but when she told him to stop and he didn’t, she said, “You do that one more time, and I’m going to knock the hell out of you.”
“Naturally, he did it again,” Billy Smith says, and Patti hit him under the chin, and he did a back flip and landed on the couch, dazed. “He looked at her like he couldn’t believe it,” in Billy’s description. “Scatter had a head like a bowling ball, but she put a dent in it.”
Alan and Sonny found his antics hilarious. Sometimes they sent him into a bedroom where a couple was making love, and Scatter would get excited and jump on the guy’s back. Elvis thought it was funny, though he was embarrassed when the chimp would masturbate in front of his female guests. (“Believe it or not, we did not teach him to do that,” says Marty Lacker.) But it fascinated Elvis, who was becoming more and more interested in all things sexual. Soon he would ask Alan to have soft porn films made for him, often of two girls wrestling in white cotton panties. It was a flashback, of sorts, to his childhood turn-on—seeing his two aunts dancing together and waving their skirts up in the air.
Patti says it’s important to remember the context of such things. “Listen, you gotta realize,” she says. “Nineteen-year-old truck driver overnight becomes superstar and super stud, which he wasn’t.”
Scatter’s days were numbered, especially when he became destructive. He tore up the drapes in hotel rooms, punched a hole in Elvis’s 35 mm projection screen, and bit the hired help. One evening, he got out and ruined a neighbor’s fancy cocktail party, the guests jumping up on the tables and the backs of couches as he roared through the house screaming “Whoo-whoo-whoo!”
Alan usually took care of him, but because he had no one specific master, Scatter simply couldn’t be controlled. He eventually brought out the worst in the guys—Lamar hated him, and poked him with a cattle prod, and Elvis whacked him with a pool cue.
Eventually, they took him back to Memphis, where he lived in a cage behind Graceland. Even there, he was a little terror, tearing the wig off a maid named Daisy when she went to feed him. He died not long after, hanging on to the side of the cage, hard as a brickbat, with his long arms out and his legs bowed. Elvis always wondered if Daisy had poisoned him.
Elvis’s own treatment of Scatter was indicative of how his behavior continued to change in the wake of his frustration over his film career and his escalating dependency on drugs. In 1962, also on Bellagio Road, his temper began to show more and more with the women who attended his parties. He got so mad at an actress that he picked up a watermelon and hurled it at her like a missile and hit her in the rear. But the more famous incident came with a girl named Judy who Elvis thought failed to mind her manners.
She had tried to get his attention, and when he went downstairs to play pool, she followed him and continued her pursuit. Finally, he had to say, “Look, I’m shooting pool, and I’m going to finish this game before I do anything else.” With that, she took the cue ball off the table, and he flushed with anger.
“If you do that again, they’ll have to surgically remove it,” he heatedly told her.
She stared him down. “You’re a smart-ass son of a bitch, aren’t you?”
No one called Elvis a son of a bitch—to him it was a slur against Gladys, and he launched the cue stick before he even knew what he had done, hitting the girl in the chest near the collarbone and almost harpooning her. “She fell right over,” Joe remembers. Elvis rushed to see about her, though he didn’t apologize, and he had one of the guys take her to the doctor. “That was the first time I saw him really, really mad, just unbelievably mad,” says Joe. Later, he cried.
In Lamar’s view, “Elvis had no parameters. He moved the lines of behavior wherever he wanted them, and if he went too far, he moved them out farther. His discipline was nonexistent. And the more insulated he got, the stranger he got.”
In March 1962, Elvis began preproduction on Girls, Girls, Girls, his first picture for Hal Wallis after Blue Hawaii. Wallis sent him back to Hawaii for location shooting, and again assigned sixty-three-year-old Norman Taurog to direct.
The producer was now certain that Elvis was best showcased as an entertainer specializing in light musical comedies, and not as an actor. To that end, Elvis would begin a long series of movies in which he would play the carefree bachelor with an offbeat occupation. The plot almost always turned on some feeble predicament over which he would triumph, winning the girl in the process.
For Girls, Girls, Girls he was cast as a charter boat pilot who moonlights as a lounge singer to buy a sailboat that once belonged to his father. The musical numbers were slighter than those in Blue Hawaii, and Elvis was humiliated by having to sing to a crustacean (“Song of the Shrimp”) and warble about the joys of ocean fishing (“We’re Coming in Loaded”). He channeled his discontent through karate, breaking as many as forty boards a day in his hotel suite until Wallis stopped him, fearing the star would injure his hand.
For Elvis, the film’s saving grace was the obvious hit, “Return to Sender,” which soared to number two and stayed on the charts for fourteen weeks, following on the heels of several other huge records, “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” “Good Luck Charm,” and “(Marie’s the Name) His Latest Flame.”
Yet one more song, “The Walls Have Ears,” a dance number with costar Laurel Goodwin, became a private joke with Elvis and the guys. “He dressed in the black trousers made for the scene,” Joe wrote in his autobiography, “without putting on underwear. Elvis rarely used underwear.”
“Hey, Joe, these pants don’t feel right,” he told him. “They’re rubbing me the wrong way.”
“The dance scene was complicated,” Joe continued. “The apartment was rigged for special effects, including a coffee table that bounced around the floor and a ceiling that crashed down a few seconds after Elvis and Laurel jumped backward, out of the way and onto a floor model record console. At some point during all the wiggling and jumping, ‘Little Elvis,’ as he called it, became erect.”
Director Taurog didn’t notice, and when Elvis came off the set, he walked straight to the nearest chair and sat down.
“Did you see that?” he whispered to Joe. “I couldn’t stop the feeling. Geez, I hope they don’t have to reshoot this. The ceiling might get me this time.”
Of course, Joe told all th
e guys, who teased Elvis mercilessly.
When he went to the dailies, Elvis nearly leapt from his seat. “Hot damn!” he said, “Will you look at that?” There was no mistaking the woody, which was not only obvious, but prominent. Joe tried to quell his fears, saying the studio would probably cut it out in the editing.
“Man, I hope they don’t see it and decide to cut it off before we get out of here,” Elvis cracked.
But when the film was released, there was “Little Elvis,” rising to attention and aimed directly at Laurel Goodwin.
On the whole, says Goodwin, whose character vied against Stella Stevens’s for his affection, “Elvis did not like this film. . . . Once he commented to me, ‘One thing about working with Wallis is that he spends a lot of money on the production, the accommodations, the catering, because he has me so cheap. With the money he makes on my movies, he then can afford to go off and do Becket.”
Elvis got along well with Laurel, who was Wallis’s second choice, replacing Dolores Hart, who had decided to enter the convent. Laurel, who was nineteen years old and making her film debut, found Elvis surprisingly sweet and attentive. He told her that he had lost Gladys four years before, and “truly believed he would one day rejoin his beloved mother.” The teen actress spent a lot of time with Elvis and the guys, who “all treated me like protective big brothers.”
However, Elvis seemed to clash with Stella Stevens. On the surface, they should have gotten along, as Stella, a year younger than Elvis, was born in Mississippi, grew up in Memphis, went to Memphis State, and had once worked as a model in the tearoom of Goldsmith’s department store. But according to Goodwin, she “had to be ordered by Hal Wallis, to whom she was under contract, to do the film.”
Stella concurs that she wasn’t keen on making an Elvis Presley picture (“I was looking to work with great actors”), and when she read the script, she threw it across the room, calling it “dreck.” She was miffed to be cast as the girl Elvis dumps, and as a singer herself, ticked that Marni Nixon dubbed her voice in the nightclub scenes. She never saw the film, she asserts, and never will.
“I was thought of as the bad girl, while Elvis was crazy about little girls in white cotton panties,” Stella has said. They never dated, because when Red West called her to see if she wanted to “hang out,” she thought Elvis should have called her himself. “They were just a group of boys having fun, but I was a grown woman by then, or life had made me one,” says the actress, who married at fifteen, had a child at sixteen, and divorced at seventeen. “I had nothing against Elvis. I thought he was greatly talented.”
But the two clashed on his professional standards. “I said, ‘Why do you do pictures like this instead of seeking out the best directors in the business?’ He said, ‘Why knock success?’ I wasn’t knocking it. I was saying, ‘There are no limits to the work you could do, rather than these singin’ and a’lovin’ and a’fightin’ films.’ ” The longer she talked, though, “the more he disliked me.”
In recent years, when a fan approached her for an autograph and asked what it was like working with Elvis, Stevens reportedly said she couldn’t stand him, and that when they were alone together, he forced himself on her, and she had to fight him off.
Whether that was true, more and more, the angry Elvis used physical force with women, including Anita.
In early 1962 she was out in California at the Bellagio Road house when Elvis was making Girls, Girls, Girls. She stayed home from the studio one day and went into the library outside Elvis’s bedroom and picked out a book. There, pressed inside, she found a letter. “I saw it was from Priscilla.”
She stood reading it, just as Priscilla had read Anita’s letters in Germany.
“I remember it said something to the effect of, ‘Please call my daddy,’ and, ‘If you call my daddy, I know he’ll let me come over there. I want to come over there soooo bad,’ like young girls talk.”
It took her breath away. “Elvis had said, ‘She’s a friend. She means nothing. She’s a fan.’ ”
She faced him with it as soon as he got home. “I said, ‘What is this letter? Who is this, this Priscilla? You said she was just a child!’ I was just furious, and he was furious, too, because I had found it. Oh, he was so upset! He grabbed me and threw me up against the closet. I said, ‘You’re telling stories, and everything you said was a lie!’ I packed my bags and came back home that night to Graceland, to Grandma.”
When she walked in the house, the phone was ringing. She didn’t want to talk to him, but he kept calling.
“I remember when he got me on the phone, he said, ‘Little, please don’t tell anybody about this. This girl, again, she’s just a child. She’s just a fourteen-year-old child. It means absolutely nothing. She just wants to visit. And if you told anybody, I’d get in a lot of trouble, she’s so young.’ He just begged me, ‘Little, Little, Little.’
“I just couldn’t imagine. Coming over to the United States . . . it didn’t sound right to me. But I said, ‘I won’t tell anybody,’ and I never did. I never did tell anybody.”
By late 1963, on Kissin’ Cousins, Elvis had a myriad of women on his mind, including costars Yvonne Craig (left), who dispensed maternal advice, and Pamela Austin. Craig also appeared in It Happened at the World’s Fair. (Robin Rosaaen Collection)
Chapter Twenty-Two
“A Little Happiness”
By the time Priscilla arrived for a two-week visit on June 17, 1962, she was no longer a fourteen-year-old girl. Elvis may have still thought of her that way, and even preferred for her to remain fourteen, which could be why he referenced her as that age in his argument with Anita. But in truth, Priscilla had celebrated her seventeenth birthday three weeks earlier. And she was a far more experienced girl than the one who had stood at the air base in Germany and waved good-bye to her soldier boyfriend.
But she was also more insecure about her place in his life. When she saw him on the big screen kissing such glamorous movie stars as Juliet Prowse, Tuesday Weld, and Joan Blackman, she wondered how she could ever measure up to such women. She was a schoolgirl in Germany.
For “two torturous years,” as she would put it, Elvis maintained only sporadic contact. Every day she waited for the mail, and every night she listened for the phone. He wasn’t much of a letter writer, but he sent her records with clues in the song titles: “I’ll Take Care of You,” “Soldier Boy,” “It’s Now or Never,” “Fever.”
“When I didn’t hear from him, I was heartbroken,” she has written. “When I did, I was ecstatic.” On the telephone, he assured her he still loved her, and no, he wasn’t going with Nancy Sinatra or any of those actresses she had read about in Photoplay magazine. He hadn’t called for the past month because he was making a movie. It didn’t mean anything.
But her fear—or possibly her mother’s fear—that he had lost interest in her spurred Priscilla to write the letter begging Elvis to bring her to the States. She didn’t know what was going on or what to do. And neither did her parents, who must have weighed the predicament of whether it was better to have Priscilla consorting with reckless boys in Germany or with an international playboy ten years her senior.
Finally Elvis said he would work out the arrangements with her stepfather and send her a first-class round-trip ticket to Los Angeles. “When Elvis wanted something with utter passion,” Priscilla says, “he could convince anyone of anything.”
Now he went to work on both of Priscilla’s parents, speaking with them at length. He wired Captain Beaulieu a detailed itinerary of where Priscilla would be every minute of her two-week trip. He also promised she would have round-the-clock chaperones—either Vernon and Dee, or George and Shirley Barris, who would open their Griffith Park home to her. The captain, so rigid and harsh at home that even his own family was afraid of him, said yes.
The reason, offers Joe Esposito, is not because Priscilla’s parents promoted this relationship more than Priscilla, as some suggest, but because “they knew that the two of them we
re in love. And Elvis loved the military. He was a very patriotic guy, and he had a lot of respect for the captain, and the captain could tell that. So that made him feel good, too.”
When the arrangements were in place, Elvis spoke with Patti and the other girls who regularly partied at the house. “I want you to know something,” he said, sounding serious. “I met this girl in Germany and we’ve been talking on the phone a lot. I’m bringing her here.” But during Priscilla’s visit, the house would be family-oriented: the guys who were married, including Joe, would bring their wives over each night, and the parties would temporarily stop.
Still, there was the problem of Anita. Elvis always spent the Fourth of July in Memphis, but the holiday fell during Priscilla’s trip to the States. So Joanie Esposito, Joe’s wife, who was pregnant with their daughter, Debbie, was assigned the task of keeping Anita occupied. If Joanie went to Memphis, Elvis figured, Anita would think he and the guys weren’t far behind. He could deal with the fallout later.
When Joe picked Priscilla up at LAX that summer day, he found a nervous teenager who had no idea what to expect. He gave her a short tour of Los Angeles, taking her by the film studios where Elvis made his movies, and then speeding along Sunset Strip to the wrought-iron gates of Bel Air and on to the mansion on Bellagio Road. In Joe’s memory, “She pretty well didn’t say too much. Whatever Elvis said was right, and she did it. Remember, Priscilla was young, naïve, and shy, didn’t know too much about the world, and was in awe of Elvis and of the life he was leading.”
Indeed, even the airport seemed beautiful to her after the drabness of Germany, and when Elvis’s butler, Jimmy, met her at the door (“Mr. P is in the den”), Priscilla could hardly believe such opulence. Joe led her downstairs, where she heard loud music and people laughing, and then she saw him, leaning over the pool table, ready to make a shot. His face lit up, and in dark trousers, a white shirt, a dark captain’s hat on his newly black hair, he looked thinner and even more breathtaking than ever.
