Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  “There she is!” he shouted, and threw down the pool stick. “There’s Priscilla!”

  He picked her up and kissed her and then gave her a wide smile. “Let me look at you,” he said. “You’re all grown up!”

  She was embarrassed that everyone was watching—Patti Parry saw fear in her eyes—and she hoped when Elvis looked her up and down that he hadn’t noticed the five pounds she’d gained, or that he didn’t think her ponytail made her seem too much like a little girl. But he did seem overjoyed to see her, even if he went right back to his pool game.

  He was different, though, than he’d been in Germany—mischievous and cocky, with a quick temper. When a girl warned him to look out for a glass teetering near the edge of the pool table, he shot her a nasty look, as if to say she should have taken care of it herself. And a few days later, when he played Priscilla some of his new songs and asked her what she thought, he “flipped out” when she told him she loved his voice, but she preferred the raw rock and roll to his new brand of polished pop.

  “I didn’t ask you what style I should be singing,” he charged. “I just asked about these songs.” Then he called her an “amateur” and stormed out of the room, slamming the door. His moods would continue to be erratic, but she knew his true nature was kind, generous, and romantic.

  That night, he sent her alone to his bedroom. “Up the stairs, the first door to your right,” he whispered to her. “The lights are on. I’ll be right up.” They would go separately, so it wouldn’t seem so obvious.

  Upstairs, she gazed at the luxurious carpets and furnishings and then at his king-size bed. “I immediately thought of how many women might have slept there . . . whose bodies he had embraced and fondled . . . and even worse, whose lips had passionately pressed his and driven him to ecstasy,” she wrote in her autobiography. “I couldn’t think about it anymore.”

  She took a quick bath and dusted with powder she found in the medicine cabinet, and soon they were lying next to each other. He told her he hadn’t been able to get her out of his mind since Germany—that she had been the one thing that kept him going.

  Their kissing was passionate and intense, and as they began to explore each other, he “discovered that I was still as untouched as he’d left me two years before.” But her sex drive was even more powerful.

  “I was ready,” she has said.

  He wasn’t. “He was glad I had saved myself, but was still committed to my purity. What could I say? What could I do? I wanted him, I know he wanted me, but according to him, the time wasn’t right.

  “We’ll know when,” he said and had Joe drive her to the Barrises’ home, where she “reluctantly” spent the night. However, that was the only night she spent with George and Shirley. After that, she slept in Elvis’s bed.

  And so, as President Bill Clinton would do nearly thirty-five years later, Elvis and Priscilla parsed the meaning of what constitutes sex, and then lied about it for years, Elvis insisting to the guys, as Priscilla did, that she was a virgin until their wedding night. (“I believe that with all my heart,” Charlie Hodge said.) If they did not have full-out sex, it was because Elvis was content with the foreplay he preferred to intercourse. But Elvis would tell one of his last girlfriends, Mindi Miller, that he and Priscilla had, indeed, been sexually involved long before they married, just as Priscilla confided the same to Billy’s wife, Jo Smith. Publicly, meanwhile, she continued to perpetuate the myth.

  The day after Priscilla arrived in Los Angeles, Patti Parry did her hair “in that big boom-bah,” as Patti puts it. “She had light hair, too, and we dyed it black.” It was Priscilla’s idea, Patti says, but the seventeen-year-old already knew what Elvis liked, or thought she did. At first, he was critical of it and made her cry. But everything got smoothed over: They were leaving the following day for Las Vegas, taking the motor home and staying at the Sahara Hotel, run by the Colonel’s mob friend, Milton Prell.

  “She’s a nice girl,” Alan Fortas told Elvis. “A little young maybe.” Alan didn’t want to come right out and say he thought theirs was an inappropriate relationship. That wouldn’t have been his style. Instead he said there were a lot of pretty girls who were legal age. But Elvis insisted that seventeen-year-old girls were a lot more advanced than seventeen-year-old boys. “Yeah,” Alan said, “but they’re still jailbait.”

  In Las Vegas, Elvis took the first steps in grooming Priscilla to be his perfect wife. He bought her half a dozen gowns and matching shoes—in part to make her look older, so she could accompany him to adult clubs—and then took her to the famous Suzy Creamcheese boutique for wilder clothes. Finally, to complete her new look, he asked Armand, a hotel hairdresser, to come to the suite. The cosmetologist then spent two hours teasing and twisting up her hair with one long curl falling at her left shoulder. Then he went to work on her makeup, applying the kohl, mascara, and eyeliner so heavily that no one could have been able to tell “if my eyes were black, blue, or black and blue.” When he finished, Priscilla had the classic, exaggerated cat-eye makeup that defined the extreme 1960s Vegas style, replete with two pairs of false eyelashes.

  “That was what Elvis wanted,” she wrote. “When I put on my brand-new brocade gown, my transformation to a sophisticated siren was complete. I looked like one of the lead dancers in the Folies-Bergère.”

  More specifically, she looked exactly like Elvis’s stripper friend, Tura Satana.

  “Goddamn, what happened to Little Cilla,” said Elvis, who had darkened his own eyelashes. “You look beautiful.”

  “Sure doesn’t look like the same girl we met in Germany wearing a sailor dress,” Joe said.

  She had changed in other ways, too. In Germany, Priscilla had only saved the pills Elvis offered her to stay awake during school. But now she took amphetamines and sleeping pills right along with him, to keep up with his hours. She liked the feeling. The pills melted away her inhibitions and put her more in sync with Elvis in every way. But she was moving in a world she didn’t know and couldn’t handle without the drugs. And deep down she was scared and confused, loaded with lurking anxiety.

  The night before she went back home to Germany, Elvis told her he would see about bringing her to Graceland for Christmas, and their lovemaking reached new heights, even if Priscilla was coy in describing it. “Elvis wasn’t going to let me go home without my taking a little of him with me,” she wrote. “He didn’t enter me; he didn’t have to. He fulfilled my every desire.”

  When she stepped off the plane in Germany, Priscilla’s parents could hardly believe their eyes. She had left two weeks earlier in a white cotton suit and nothing more than a touch of mascara. But she came home in a tight black dress, with her hair in an architectural monstrosity. Her mother remembers that she “obviously had been crying. Her eyeliner was running, her eyes were red. She looked lost and terribly sad.”

  Captain Beaulieu was more blunt: “Her eyes looked like two piss holes in the snow.” When Priscilla asked to go to the ladies’ room to wipe her face, her father yanked her up. “You’re going straight home,” he barked. “If you left it on this long, you might as well keep it on another hour.” He barely said another word to her until they got home. For a girl whose self-worth had been tied to her physical appearance since she was a child competing in beauty contests, it was devastating.

  Now Elvis, too, was in deep, and he faced his toughest Christmas since the year he brought Dottie Harmony to town. If he convinced Captain Beaulieu to let Priscilla return for the holidays, he was going to have to break things off with Anita. There was no way he would not be at Graceland for Christmas. And if he were in Memphis with Priscilla, there was no way that Anita wouldn’t know. Anita would expect to spend Christmas with him herself.

  “It was a tough choice,” in Joe Esposito’s estimation. “Anita is a great lady.” But Priscilla looked like Gladys, and Anita didn’t. In fact, every time he looked at Anita, he was reminded of how he’d disappointed Gladys in not marrying her. Anita was also older and might
resume her career at any time. If Elvis were to marry, he wanted a traditional wife who stayed home and cared for the house and family. “He pretty well raised Priscilla to be that way,” says Joe. “He fell out of love with Anita because he started dating Priscilla.”

  On July 10, 1962, Elvis returned to Memphis and resumed his usual activities, playing touch football, renting out the Memphian, and three or four nights a week, watching the night turn to dawn on the rides at the Fairgrounds. As before, Anita was his date, but he knew not to mention Priscilla to her. She’d found out that Priscilla had visited him in L.A., and she knew the teenager was in his life. But Anita convinced herself that Priscilla’s youth ruled her out as serious competition and clung to the notion that there were certain kinds of girls that Elvis spent time with, but others he reserved for marriage. Besides, they’d been together five years. It was a real relationship, not some little infatuation.

  Then one evening, Anita was coming down the back stairs at Graceland when she heard Elvis, Alan, and Lamar talking in the kitchen, sitting around the breakfast bar.

  As she neared the door, “I heard Elvis say something like, ‘Well, I’m just having a really hard time making up my mind between the two.’ And, of course, I stopped. I knew exactly what he was talking about. Back then, girls had pride, and I was very prideful. So I just marched my little self down the stairs.”

  They went into the dining room to have their evening meal—breakfast for Elvis—and sat down at the table with Vernon.

  “I heard what you just said,” she announced, her voice shaky with anger, “and I’m going to make it real easy for you. You’re not going to have to make that choice, because I’m going to leave.”

  She had hot tears in her eyes, and she got up and called her brother, Andy, to come get her. Elvis followed her and put his hands on her shoulders and said, “I hope to God I’m doing the right thing in letting you go.” Anita shook him off. She was too hurt for a conversation like that, even though it had been the most difficult decision she’d ever made. “You can’t keep me from going!” she snapped. “I’m going!” Then she calmed down and simply said, “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t make any difference.”

  They walked back into the dining room, and “Elvis became very upset, and Mr. Presley began to cry, too.” Nobody could eat a bite, and then Vernon said, “Well, if you must leave, Anita, maybe you’ll meet again. There are people who sometimes separate and get back together. You’ll get back together again.” Anita shook her head. “I don’t know. I’m not planning on it.” Then she left to go upstairs and pack her things.

  When she came down, Elvis thought about how she had stopped working to be with him, and then shoved some money down in her purse. But even that angered her. “No,” she yelled, “I don’t want any money!” She took it out. And then she left.

  “It was very hard, but I never went back again as his girlfriend.”

  She moved home to Jackson, Tennessee, for a while, and later began working for the Memphis city commissioner. Then one day Elvis showed up at her office. “He caught me in the hall up there, and I could never get away from him. He had me cornered talking to me. My goodness, my knees got weak, because I still cared. But I’d made up my mind that it was over.”

  At the end of August 1962, Elvis began work on It Happened at the World’s Fair, his twelfth film, and his first in a four-picture deal with MGM. Norman Taurog would again direct. The light musical comedy costarred Joan O’Brien as Elvis’s love interest and was set in Seattle against the real-time backdrop of the 1962 exposition. Elvis plays a crop duster in money straits: his partner (Gary Lockwood) gambled away their money, and the sheriff has attached a lien to their plane.

  It Happened at the World’s Fair is memorable for both the number eleven hit, “One Broken Heart for Sale,” and Elvis’s sartorial splendor. Hollywood tailor Sy Devore dressed him in conservative suits and ties to make him look “like a smart, well-dressed young businessman,” according to producer Ted Richmond. Thus Elvis’s metamorphosis from rebellious rock and roller to handsome leading man was complete. It Happened at the World’s Fair is also the only picture on which Elvis had the Memphis Mafia dress in actual uniforms—black short-sleeve tunics over white shirts with black pants. It gave them all a slight garage mechanic look, but for Elvis, it was just like being back in the army—each of his troops had his name festooned across his breast pocket, JOE, ALAN, BILLY. The only difference was that now Elvis was the general, in total power and in complete control of his black-suited brigade.

  Research on twinless twins such as Elvis has shown an odd, yet consistent and inherent fascination with “uniformity.” They commonly talk of being powerfully drawn to groups of individuals dressed alike. The semblance of everyone appearing, if not being, the same—identical, twinned—is at the base of their motivation and intrigue. It gives them a sense of solace and reinforces the notion that they are not alone—a feeling Elvis wrestled with to the extreme once his mother passed away.

  While seldom publicly reported, says psychologist Whitmer, “The need for uniformity underscores the difficulty any twinless twin has in communicating to others with a different personal history the strange world in which he finds himself trapped.”

  The cast of It Happened at the World’s Fair included two young actors who would go on to distinguish themselves: Kurt Russell, playing a bit part as a bratty child who kicks Elvis in the shin (and would later portray Elvis in a television film), and TV’s future “Batgirl,” Yvonne Craig, who had a secondary role.

  “It was not a good film. I had a small part, and it was a dance number, although I didn’t dance. My sister and I went to the drive-in movie to see it, and I didn’t want to stay for the rest of it. I just wanted to see how I looked with short hair. After [my scene] was over, I would like to have left, but I thought, ‘God, that’s really egocentric,’ so I sat there bored witless, and my sister did, too. Finally, she said, ‘Would you mind terribly if we went?’ I said, ‘No, no, I’d love it!’ I was sitting there dying.”

  Elvis romanced three of the actresses on the film, including the blond O’Brien, a former country singer who had made the jump to acting and was just finalizing her divorce, and brunette Sandra Giles, whose name appeared near the end of the credits. She was amused when she met Elvis on the set: “He said to one of his men, ‘Would you get up and give Miss Giles your chair?’ But usually the man gets up and gives you his chair.” They went out to a steak restaurant in a place where “you had to know the owner to get in,” and just sat and talked. “We had a few dates and he was very nice. He wasn’t pushy. He didn’t even try to make out.”

  Elvis was equally genteel with Yvonne Craig, who was impressed at how he interacted with the women on the film. Just as he knew what his female fans expected, he also knew that all of the women in the cast needed his attention.

  “It wasn’t predatory at all, or it didn’t seem so to me. It was more of a southern gentleman thing. He would spend five minutes with each of the girls on the set, one at a time. It was really sweet to see. And it was like having fourteen brothers with the guys. They were all around, lighting your cigarette and asking if you would like another Pepsi.”

  Yvonne wondered if Elvis was going to ask her out—she could feel a sort of latent heat between them—and finally, he made his move. During shooting, Joe called and made his smooth approach: “Elvis wanted me to ask if you would be free for dinner.” Yvonne was dating someone else at the time, but not exclusively, and so she accepted. In an unusual move, Elvis accompanied Gene Smith and Richard Davis, a new member of the group, to pick her up, mostly because he wanted to show off his gold-dusted Cadillac. George Barris had recently customized it, repainting the black exterior in white Murano pearl, and finishing the interior with “solid gold,” as Barris liked to say, meaning everything was gold-plated and stamped with a golden guitar insignia. The effect was something between a rock-and-roll chariot and a pimpmobile.

  Richard knocked at Yvonne’s doo
r and told her that Elvis was waiting in the car.

  “I lived in an apartment that was like a cell block or some other kind of lockup—it was all square and you could look down in the patio and see who was coming and going. And when I saw this car, I said, ‘Oh, my!’ It was the weirdest thing I had ever seen. Elvis said very apologetically, ‘I brought this because I thought it might be fun. It’s not like I travel like this all the time.’

  “It had deep, deep, deep carpeting, so that when you got in, your feet sort of sank in and disappeared. And then he pushed all the buttons for me. It had two telephones, one with a direct line to Memphis. It had a complete entertainment center. It had an electric shoeshine machine, and a bar filled with Pepsi. He offered me one, which I thought was funny. Oh, it was a crazy-looking thing.”

  When they arrived on Bellagio Road, Jimmy, the butler, served the two of them what should have been a romantic dinner. But the house was so baronial, and the table so long and expansive—it probably sat thirty people, by Yvonne’s estimation—that everything just seemed awkward. “I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, if he sits at the end, I’m so nearsighted I’ll never see him.’ So I sat at the head of the table and he sat next to me. But because he was shy and I was, too, there wasn’t a lot of conversation. All you could hear was the sound of chewing and forks going.”

  The scene proved livelier when they joined the guys and their dates afterward to watch television. Scatter, the chimp, made an appearance, all dressed up like a person in a little suit and hat. But Yvonne wasn’t wearing her glasses (“There was this thing that came into the room and someone was holding on to him”), and at first, she thought he was one of the boys being silly. She quickly caught on when Scatter started jumping around and misbehaving.