Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  “We were quiet, polite, and careful,” Ann-Margret remembered in her autobiography, My Story. “But I knew what was going to happen once we got to know each other. Elvis did, too. We both felt a current that went straight through us. It would become a force we couldn’t control.”

  Ann-Margret was the female Elvis, all beauty, sex, and talent. She spoke in a breathy, morning-after voice that managed to sound real, and projected a paradox of midwestern reserve and raw sensuality. Men would have died for her.

  On day one, they both realized the relationship would be serious, but whether Elvis knew it immediately, Ann-Margret was the woman he had waited for all his life. He had been deluded into thinking so many girls were his twin soul, but now he was face-to-face with the one woman who fulfilled that destiny.

  She felt it, too, writing, “It was like discovering a long-lost relative, a soul mate . . . shy on the outside, but unbridled within. . . . In many ways, both of us, despite fame and whatever else we’d achieved so quickly, had remained very childlike, and emotionally dependent. We wanted to find that same nonjudgmental, unqualified love that our parents gave us. . . . He had touched something deep within my psyche.”

  Just as they said the same exact words when they were introduced, when they began to rehearse their dance routines, they looked at each other and saw virtual mirror images: “When Elvis thrust his pelvis, mine slammed forward, too. When his shoulder dropped, I was down there with him. When he whirled, I was already on my heel.”

  “It’s uncanny,” she said. Elvis grinned.

  “The minute they looked into each other’s eyes, they clicked,” says Joe Esposito. “There’s no two ways about it. You could just feel the energy.”

  Now Elvis asked Joe to find out if Ann-Margret was single. Learning she was, he bypassed his usual approach to courting and picked up the phone himself.

  “Rusty,” he said, using her character’s name in the film, “how about going out with me and the guys to see a show?” It was a group date, innocent and friendly, and they were never alone for a second. But the next time he asked her out, he brought her home to Perugia Way, and he told the guys he wanted the house to himself when he got back. Their late-night talks revealed a shared love of motorcycles, music, and performing, along with strong family and religious ties.

  At first Ann-Margret told no one but her parents. But soon, says Joe, the secret was out: “Everybody on the movie set will tell you that when they were together, it was obvious they loved each other.”

  Soon they were wheeling through L.A. on their Harleys, and pedaling around Bel Air “on a bicycle built for double takes.”

  “People honked, we waved,” she wrote.

  It was the worst possible time for Elvis to be falling in love—only four months earlier, he had made promises to a military captain and installed a teenager in his home and in his bed. But neither he nor the kittenish redhead could deny what was happening.

  “Ann-Margret really was the love of his life,” says Patti Parry. “She was just the best girl. And they were like little kids together, laughing and having fun.”

  They spent a lot of time together, and as Lamar remembers, “it blew our minds” that he went with her alone so much. “We would give him a bunch of money, and he’d jump in that Rolls-Royce and stay gone. Nobody knew where he was, except that he was with her.” Part of the time, he was over visiting her parents at their apartment, an indication of how serious he was about the girl he called “Rusty Ammo,” and “Thumper,” the code name she would later use when she phoned for him at Graceland. As for what she called him, “When I like someone,” she told a magazine, “I say scoobie. Elvis is scoobie.”

  The Memphis Mafia, half in love with her themselves, could hardly stand the thoughts of the two of them together. When the film went on location in Las Vegas, Elvis stayed in Milton Prell’s suite at the Sahara, and he and Ann-Margret secluded themselves there for the weekend. The guys “aggravated the shit out of them,” as Marty Lacker recounts, Red and Lamar stuffing newspaper under the door and lighting it. “They even shined butter knives ’til they looked like mirrors. And then they slipped ’em under the door to see if they could see Ann-Margret without her clothes on. They tried everything. But Elvis and Ann-Margret would not come out of that suite.”

  “It was a very strong relationship, very intense,” she has said. Elvis was so entranced by their lovemaking that he later had a round bed made for her in pink, but when word leaked out about it, Elvis made sure not to be seen with her at industry events. He invited Yvonne Craig to go with him to the screening of the film, and when she pried him for information, “he was very circumspect about the whole thing.”

  Viva Las Vegas was an immediate hit, topping Blue Hawaii as Elvis’s highest grossing film ever—by 1969, revenues would reach $5.5 million, up from Elvis’s usual movie gross of $3 million.

  Colonel Parker might have been expected to see that spending money for bigger costars, bankable directors, and an involving script would ensure longevity for his client. But during production, he constantly harped that Viva Las Vegas was over budget, which could mean a loss of profit participation, a given in each of Elvis’s movie contracts.

  However, on several levels, Parker was also greatly worried about Ann-Margret. The artful manager was nervous about what she might have told Elvis about the way other managers worked—that they took far less than the 50 percent that Parker commanded on some of his deals. And the Colonel was unhappy that director Sidney seemed intent on awarding Ann-Margret as much screen time as Elvis. He grumbled that the director gave her more close-ups and flattering camera angles, and complained that it was difficult to tell just whose film it was. He also nixed special billing for her in the advertisements that MGM hoped would help draw audiences beyond Elvis’s core fans. “If someone else should ride on our back,” Parker huffed, “then we should get a better saddle.”

  Parker may have been looking after his client, but he was particularly shortsighted in insisting that the director cut the couple’s duets down from three to one. The news didn’t go over well with RCA, either, remembered Joan Deary, who was then Steve Sholes’s secretary.

  “There was no cut of Ann-Margret on the Viva Las Vegas product, because the Colonel did not believe that anyone should cash in on Elvis’s popularity.” Though several of the Ann-Margret songs have appeared since Elvis’s death, “There was never any female singer on any of Elvis’s albums with the exception of Nancy Sinatra [“Your Groovy Self,” from Speedway], and that was because of the Colonel’s friendship with Frank. We had no influence on what [songs] went into the movies, and no choice of what the selections were going to be in that [soundtrack] album. The movie years were the worst years for Elvis’s music that we ever had. There were a few exceptions, but most of the songs were ridiculous.”

  Viva Las Vegas was, indeed, an exception, with the title song becoming one of the most recognizable and popular songs in the Presley canon. Elvis also sang the rest of the soundtrack with new enthusiasm. But Parker still seemed oblivious as to how the movie resuscitated his client’s spirits and musical dynamism.

  None of that was lost on Priscilla, however, because by the time the cast and crew returned to Los Angeles, the press had picked up on Elvis’s relationship with Ann-Margret, the inspiration for his creative renewal.

  “They hold hands. They disappear into his dressing room between shots. They lunch together in seclusion,” Bob Thomas wrote in an Associated Press story that summer.

  And they talked marriage, she admits. But Elvis had stalling to do both in Hollywood and in Memphis. Earlier, he had described Ann-Margret to Priscilla, now eighteen, as merely “a typical Hollywood starlet.” Then one afternoon she picked up the Memphis Press-Scimitar and read a story headlined, “It Looks Like Romance for Elvis and Ann-Margret.” That evening, she grilled him on the phone. “Is there anything to it?” she demanded.

  “Hell, no,” he lied and then repeated his mantra that reporters blew every
thing out of proportion. “She comes around here mostly on weekends on her motorcycle. She hangs out and jokes with the guys. That’s it.”

  But Priscilla’s intuition told her otherwise. She knew he had little affairs all the time, but the fact that everybody called Ann-Margret “the female Elvis,” and that she had the same effect on men that Elvis had on women scared her. How could he resist that, his equal?

  “That one affected her tremendously,” Joe confirms. “She was very, very upset. She couldn’t believe it, and she was very concerned that he was not going to marry her. I can’t even think what was going through her mind. That had to be very tough for her.”

  Billy Smith says that Elvis and Priscilla had many arguments about Ann-Margret, usually upstairs in his room at Graceland. Then Priscilla came up with a new strategy. She watched Ann-Margret’s movies and learned some of her dance moves, then began dressing like her and doing her hair like hers, too. Billy’s wife, Jo Smith, tried to help her, and told Billy “she’d stand in front of a full-length mirror just cussing Ann-Margret, all the time trying to be as much like her as possible. It was pitiful.” Soon she enrolled in the Patricia Stevens Finishing School in Memphis.

  But she also began emulating some of Elvis’s behavior, pursuing seventeen-year-old Mylon LeFevre, of the gospel group The Singing LeFevres. The first time she met the wild-haired teen backstage at Ellis Auditorum, Marty Lacker’s wife, Patsy, went with her and was stunned to see Priscilla openly flirt with him. After that, Patsy refused to go with her, as did Jo Smith. “She went down to the auditorium every time Mylon came to town,” says Marty. Once Mylon found out Priscilla was Elvis Presley’s girlfriend, he made himself unavailable.

  When Elvis began his next picture, Kissin’ Cousins, in October, Priscilla insisted on accompanying him. She loved Los Angeles, and she’d grown tired of the stultifying pace of Memphis when Elvis wasn’t home. But most of all, she was there to size up the competition, knowing full well that Ann-Margret was still in Elvis’s life, even though Viva Las Vegas had wrapped six weeks before. She made sure to wear her five-star diamond on her ring finger.

  But two days after Priscilla’s arrival, Ann-Margret stunned the entertainment world with a syndicated UPI interview from London, where she was attending the royal premiere of Bye Bye Birdie. She was in love with Elvis, she announced, but she didn’t know if they would marry.

  Priscilla was hurt, humiliated, and livid. And when Elvis told her the Colonel thought she should return to Memphis until the publicity died down (“Honey, I’m gonna have to ask you to leave”), she finally broke.

  “What’s going on here?” she wrote in her memoir. “I’m tired of these secrets. Telephone calls. Notes. Newspapers!” She picked up a vase of flowers and threw it, watching it shatter against the wall.

  “I hate her!” she yelled. “Why doesn’t she keep her ass in Sweden where she belongs?”

  Elvis went on the offensive.

  “Look, goddamn it! I didn’t know this was going to get out of hand. I want a woman who’s going to understand that things like this might just happen.” He looked at her hard. “Are you going to be her—or not?”

  “I stared back at him, furious and defiant,” she wrote, “hating him for what he was putting me through.” But in the end, she went home, wanting to please him, wanting not to disappoint her parents. When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated later that month, Elvis watched the awful aftermath with Ann-Margret, not Priscilla.

  Kissin’ Cousins, in which Elvis plays dual roles as a dark-haired, upright military man (Josh) and a blond hillbilly Lothario (Jodie), was in some ways a new take on his own story. Producer Sam Katzman, known in Hollywood as “King of the Quickies” for his low-budget pictures and tight shooting schedules, filmed it in seventeen days.

  Parker had asked for him after the experience on Viva Las Vegas. He didn’t much care what Katzman’s product was like, as long as most of the money ended up on the Colonel’s side of the equation. While the film was in production, Parker negotiated a $750,000 contract with Allied Artists for Tickle Me. Another slight picture, it would sacrifice quality production values, known actors, and even new music (the soundtrack would be made up of previously recorded songs) to pay half the budget in salary to the star. Like Tickle Me, Kissin’ Cousins, with a budget of $800,000 compared to $4 million for Blue Hawaii, would be an embarrassment to Elvis, especially as the finale prominently showed his stand-in, Lance LeGault. (“It’s too expensive to shoot it over—no one will even notice,” said Katzman.) Many regard it as Elvis’s worst picture ever.

  The film required Elvis to wear a light hairpiece for his twin, the character of Jodie, and according to Cynthia Pepper, who played the role of Corporal Midge Riley, “He hated that blond wig. He didn’t want to come out of the dressing room.”

  He found it emasculating, and it took him back to the Elvis of old, before he reinvented himself as the suave and dark-haired leading man. But in some ways, Elvis should have felt comfortable on the set. For a few days, at least, he enjoyed a triumvirate of women who re-created the psychological set-up he enjoyed with his mother and, by extension, Jessie Garon.

  Yvonne Craig, cast in the role of Azalea, Josh’s girlfriend, had already proven herself a Gladys substitute. In blond Cynthia Pepper, whom he dated and requested after seeing her in the TV series Margie, he found a replica and a peer. And when Priscilla was on set, he had his “child” to rear and shelter.

  As Cynthia noted, “Everybody had a different relationship with him. When we did the scene where he sings to me, we were out in Big Bear Lake, and we had a pause. It was sprinkling a little bit, and we were talking, and he said, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing here.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘I mean making all these movies. I should be back home driving a truck.’ ”

  He watched over Cynthia, who was twenty-three but young and naïve, by her account. When producer Katzman repeatedly made innuendos about the two of them having spent the night together (“He said, ‘Why didn’t you wake me up when the alarm went off?’, and I would just die with embarrassment, because it wasn’t true”), Elvis put the funny man in his place: “Hey, that’s enough. Leave her alone.”

  Elvis was not above pulling his own prank on her, though. The script calls for Cynthia’s character to flip him over her shoulder, and they rehearsed the scene over and over. “One time I flipped him, and no one was around, and he didn’t get up. He had his eyes shut, and it was like he’d hit his head and he was out. The only thing I could think of was, ‘Oh, my God, I killed Elvis!” He let it go for a minute or two, which seemed like forever, and then he said, ‘Gotcha!’ ”

  If he hated making the film, which Cynthia later heard, she didn’t see it at the time. He was always professional, knowing everybody’s lines, and showing up for the over-the-shoulder shots that most stars would leave for the stand-ins. Yvonne, too, was impressed with him, seeing he was such a natural actor that he didn’t appear to be working at all.

  “I’ve only seen that with one other person, and that was Spencer Tracy. You’d think, ‘He’s just putting in his time and not doing anything.’ Then you’d go to the dailies, and he’d be so riveting that you couldn’t look at anybody else.”

  As on It Happened at the World’s Fair, Elvis invited Yvonne over to the house for dinner, teasing her about her big sunglasses and calling her “Bug.” Again, they ended upstairs in his playpen of a bedroom (“back where he shouldn’t be taking women”), this time to watch a Katharine Hepburn movie. Yvonne continued to give him all kinds of unsolicited advice: that perhaps he should dye his hair dark brown, because his was so shiny black that it ate the light. (“He said he would think about it.”) And that he ought to take on some meaty roles again, since all his movies had him bursting into song, like an operetta.

  She saw how he could sit on a set and know what everyone was doing and why. “If you are that observant,” she told him, “and you understand everybody’s motivation, it just makes for a w
hole depth that you could bring to almost every character.” But he was tired of hearing it, tired of fighting. “I don’t make any of those decisions,” he said, and the next time she looked over at him, he had drifted off to sleep.

  “I figured I needed to get out of there, so I went around and like a good fairy, shut off the TV and all the lights, and quietly tiptoed out of his room. As I was walking down the hall, Joe Esposito was coming to see if I would like to go home. I said to him, ‘Listen, Elvis fell asleep. I shut out all of the lights, but he needs to get undressed.’ And Joe said, ‘You shut out all of the lights?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Well, Elvis likes to sleep with a light on.’ And I said, ‘How would I know that? I’m not his mother.’ We laughed, and he said, ‘I’ll fix it,’ and then we went on downstairs.”

  But when they opened the door, there were five Bel Air patrol cars in the drive, and at least that many officers pointing guns right at their hearts.

  Joe looked at Yvonne.

  “Did you touch a button up by the top of the bed?”

  “I touched all of the buttons until the lights went out,” she said meekly, not realizing she had inadvertently pushed a panic button that summoned the cops.

  “The next day on the set, I was sitting in my chair and Elvis sheepishly came up and said, ‘I hear you called the police because I went to sleep in your face.’ ”

  They never worked together again, but Yvonne would see Elvis around Hollywood now and then. Sometimes they would pass each other in Beverly Hills, and he would lean out the window and yell, “Hey, Bug!” She loved it.

  During Priscilla’s brief time on the Kissin’ Cousins set, she impressed the cast and crew in various ways. One of the actresses found her chilly (“Not a bit of warmth there—Elvis had it all”). But Yvonne thought just the opposite. “She was very poised, and you know, she was just a baby. She said to me, ‘I was so jealous of you during It Happened at the World’s Fair. But I’m not now.’ She said, ‘I thought you were a threat.’ And I went, ‘Wow! It takes a lot of guts to say that to somebody, especially at her age.’ ”