by Alanna Nash
But Priscilla, who had spent so much of her life concealing her true emotions, did a fine job of masking her insecurity. “I always felt worn out because there were such emotional highs and lows,” she would say nearly thirty years later. “There was never really any time that I let my guard down.”
Actress Mary Ann Mobley made Elvis Girl Happy in June 1964, but off the set, their friendship was based more on respect and shared background. Though she adored him, “It was like I was working with my brother.” (Courtesy of Mary Ann Mobley)
Chapter Twenty-Four
Satyrs and Spirits
In January 1964, not long after celebrating his twenty-ninth birthday, Elvis took the entourage—including foreman Joe Esposito, Alan Fortas, Richard Davis, Billy Smith, Jimmy Kingsley, and the newly returned Marty Lacker, to Las Vegas for an extended vacation. Priscilla was at home. They stayed at the Sahara, and each night they attended shows around town by such disparate acts as Fats Domino, Don Rickles, Tony Martin, Della Reese, and the Clara Ward Singers. At the Desert Inn, they also took in a performance by the McGuire Sisters, Christine, Dorothy, and Phyllis, best known for their songs “Sincerely” and “Sugartime.”
If Elvis defined the liberal and progressive culture of the 1950s, the McGuire Sisters embodied the conservative and staid white majority. Yet immediately Phyllis, a pretty blonde, caught Elvis’s eye. He thought of Anita Wood, who was then engaged to the Cleveland Browns’ tight end Johnny Brewer, and would marry the NFL star later that year. It hurt Elvis to think of Anita with someone else, but it was too late to go back now, and he tried not to think about it. Still, at times, he did.
“Man,” he told Marty Lacker, now staring at Phyllis, “she’s as pretty as Anita.” He repeated it several times, his eyes fixed on her. When the show was over, he said, “I’ve got to meet her,” and they all went backstage. After that, Elvis returned to the Desert Inn every night—not to see the show, but to visit Phyllis in her dressing room, often staying more than two hours.
One of the braver guys finally said it might not be such a good idea for Elvis to keep seeing Phyllis, since it was well known that she was the girlfriend of mob boss Sam Giancana. Elvis paid no attention to it, and one evening he told Marty to get him up by noon the next day and to make sure the Rolls-Royce was ready.
Elvis seemed anxious when Marty knocked on his door that afternoon, and he insisted on driving the Rolls himself. They ended up at the Desert Inn.
“We went upstairs, and Elvis knew exactly which room to go to. He knocked on the door, and Phyllis cracked it open a little, because she had the chain on it. Her hair was in rollers. Elvis started talking to her, but she didn’t really want to let him in. So he said to me, ‘Why don’t you just go wait in the car?’ ”
An hour and a half later, Elvis came down. They were driving back to the Sahara, and all of a sudden, he started laughing.
“What’s so funny?” Marty asked.
“I was up there with her,” Elvis said, “and I noticed there was a gun sticking out of her purse. I asked her what she was doing with it, and she said Giancana had given it to her for protection. And I said, ‘Well, tell him I carry two of ’em.’ ”
Marty felt a chill and then cautioned his boss that that might have been a foolish thing to say. “What if she goes back and says that to the guy in a way he doesn’t like?” But Elvis just smiled.
“We were rather attracted to each other,” Phyllis admits. “We had a few dates. It was nice. The nights in Las Vegas are quite beautiful, and I was so impressed with his car, because I had never ridden in a Rolls-Royce. I remember that he opened the glove compartment, and there was this beautiful, beautiful gun.”
They drove out to the desert, and Elvis shot the gun for her, showed her he wasn’t afraid of a firearm, or much else. “He always did everything to the fullest. I giggled and laughed, and I thought it was the greatest thing. So we bonded in more ways than one.”
At the end of February he started work on Roustabout, a carnival picture with Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Freeman. Roustabout is memorable only for the black leather figure Elvis cuts on a motorcycle, and for the musical highlight, “Little Egypt.” But what he would remember most was how the notoriously iron-willed Stanwyck belittled him in conversation. She referred to a Greek goddess, and Elvis told her he was unfamiliar with the name. “You don’t know who Athena is?” she chided, her voice full of scorn. Elvis turned scarlet and made his exit, but the next day he hunkered down with a stack of books on Greek mythology in his dressing room.
Sonny West saw that “there was a little situation there at first. She was very cool toward Elvis. But once again, his charm. He never backed off. It was a challenge to him. Later she told him why she didn’t want to get close to him at first. She took him aside and said, ‘It’s because you remind me so much of Robert.’ She was referring to Robert Taylor, the love of her life. . . . They had the same look: dark hair, smoldering features. ‘He was gorgeous, and you’re gorgeous,’ she said to Elvis.”
The Roustabout soundtrack logged the top spot on the charts, but it would be the last of his to do so, both because the music became weaker on subsequent films, and because Beatlemania and the British invasion were just about to dominate the American music scene. When the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show that February, Parker sent a congratulatory telegram “from Elvis and the Colonel” for the old impresario to read on the air. It was a clever way to attach Elvis to his competitors, and to attempt to convince viewers that he was still on top.
“Elvis always said there’s room for everybody,” Red West would recount. “He was never threatened.”
But privately Elvis told women just the opposite, that he was very worried about the Beatles’ ascension, especially as their 1964 film, A Hard Day’s Night, was an inventive piece of moviemaking. Elvis’s films, still churned out at three a year and timed for release during school vacations, had become passé, and he knew it. “They never go to bed in a Presley picture,” an MGM spokesman would be quoted as saying in the Saturday Evening Post. “Otherwise, mamas wouldn’t let their kids come.”
“When he made movies,” his late record producer, Felton Jarvis said, “he’d have to sing to a cow, or a dog, or a kid, because they were situation songs—they fit into the script. I remember him talking about the soundtrack to Roustabout. They were cutting the title song, and he told the Jordanaires, ‘Fellas, sing along with me on the chorus.’ And the director [John Rich] ran out [in the studio] and said, ‘Elvis, I don’t think you understand where this song’s going to be in the picture. You’re riding down the highway on a motorcycle, singing. If the Jordanaires are singing, too, where are they supposed to be?’ And Elvis said, ‘The same damn place the band is.’ ”
In Roustabout, Sue Ane Langdon plays the fortune-teller, Madame Mijanou, and recalls that she almost passed on the film, “because doing an Elvis movie at that time was not such a sensational thing to do.” She acquiesced mainly because she’d always wanted to work with Stanwyck. Nonetheless, she enjoyed her kissing scenes with Elvis (“his lips were very, very soft”) and recalls he giggled through most of them. Around the set, he called her “Madame,” for her character. “He thought that was so funny.”
The opening scenes of Roustabout introduce Elvis as a short-tempered singer (Charlie Rogers) who loses his job at a roadhouse for brawling. Making her uncredited film debut as a college girl in the audience was twenty-three-year-old Raquel Welch.
Like so many adolescents of the 1950s, Raquel had been “completely gaga over Elvis.” She saw him live in San Diego in 1956 at her first rock-and-roll concert, and she was struck by how he was able to synthesize the sensuality and the sexuality of black music for the mainstream. She was also smitten with him. “That was the first time I ever conjured up what a sexy guy could be. It was just so cool to see a guy dance like that. And then he had this wonderful, full, rich voice. But he also had the attitude down, and that sexy little sneer.”
She hadn’t
kept up with him, though, and when she saw him on the set of Roustabout eight years later, “It was a little shocking to me, because they took all the sex out of him! He was a whitewashed, cleaned-up Elvis. His clothes were not the same, his hair was obviously dyed, and it was all sprayed into place—no cool tendrils flopping over on his forehead. He didn’t even move the same way. I thought, ‘Why have they made this fabulous guy all antiseptic?’ He was like a cardboard figure.”
Raquel had hoped to find a moment to speak to him, but “there were all those guys to go through. There was no such thing as walking up to Elvis on a set.” And all the official work time was orchestrated and appointed, so “there was never any chance for him to sit and schmooze.” Then one day, all the actresses were called to shoot publicity stills with him, and Raquel was included.
“They lined us all up, and Elvis came in for something like fifty-seven seconds, and he was so charming. He had a smile for everybody—‘Oh, this isn’t too hard to do, all these good-looking girls’—and he kidded around with the guys and the photographer a little bit. Then they said, ‘We got it, Elvis,’ and that was it.”
But later, one of the entourage approached her and invited her to a party at the house. She felt funny about it—she wasn’t sure if it was an invitation from Elvis or from the guys, using Elvis. “I’d had a very strict upbringing, and there was a way that things were supposed to be done. And what would happen if there was someone else there that he was more interested in? I didn’t like the setup, so I didn’t go. I figured if he thought I was that attractive or wanted to see me again, it would have been different.”
She never did get a word with him (“I know people think that I’m very formidable, but I’m really quite shy”), but she watched his every move from the sidelines—how he did his takes, how many takes, what he did in between. “I was just fascinated. And I was so green. I wanted to see how everything worked, and how a real star behaved. He was just so polite, and very jokey in between the takes. You can’t help but think that was the real Elvis, the nice, well-spoken, well-mannered southern guy who was just so hot.”
Photo Insert
Vernon and Gladys Presley, around the time of their marriage, 1933. (Courtesy of David Troedson/Elvis Australia)
Young Gladys, probably late 1940s–early 1950s. (Robin Rosaaen Collection)
When Vernon was incarcerated at Parchman Penitentiary for forgery, Gladys began a letter-writing campaign seeking parole or pardon. In this letter dated November 25, 1938, she pleads, “I have a little boy three years old. Please send [my husband] home to his wife and baby.” (Parchman Penitentiary Archives/Courtesy Roy Turner)
Elvis and Regis Wilson, Humes High senior prom, 1953. (Courtesy of Regis Wilson Vaughn)
Wanda Jackson and the Memphis Flash, first meeting, Cape Girardeau, Missouri, 1955. (Courtesy of Wanda Jackson and Wendell Goodman)
Carolyn Bradshaw during her stint on Hometown Jamboree, late 1954, just before returning to the Louisiana Hayride and meeting Elvis. (Courtesy of Carolyn Bradshaw Shanahan)
Elvis poses with the architects of his Sun career, Sam Phillips and Marion Keisker, in this undated photograph, probably from 1956. (Courtesy of Connie Lauridsen Burk)
During his Las Vegas debut in April 1956, Elvis befriended thirteen-year-old Nancy Hebenstreit (now Kozikowski) and posed for a spooky photo booth picture for her at the Last Frontier Village penny arcade. (Courtesy of Nancy Kozikowski)
Maid of Cotton Patricia Cowden (left) and Memphis Cotton Carnival Queen Clare Mallory gave Elvis the royal treatment just before his performance at Ellis Auditorium, May 15, 1956. (Robert Williams/the Commercial Appeal)
Gladys kept scrapbooks of Elvis’s early press coverage. Here, mother and son peruse a magazine in the living room of their new home on Audubon Drive, probably spring 1956. (Robin Rosaaen Collection)
Elvis’s relationship with his young fans crossed brotherly affection with erotic desire. (Paul Lichter’s Elvis Photo Archives/elvisunique.com)
When fourteen-year-old Jackie Rowland and her mother, Marguerite, visited the Presleys on Audubon Drive, July 4, 1956, Elvis treated her more like a girlfriend than an adoring fan. (Copyright Jackie Rowland 1978. All rights reserved)
Elvis and the guys aboard the Aunt Jennie with June Juanico, her mother, May, and May’s boyfriend, Eddie Bellman, July 1956. (Robin Rosaaen Collection)
Elvis, Natalie Wood, and Nick Adams became “almost a threesome, having a lot of fun together,” as she put it. They clowned for a Hollywood photographer in September 1956, while taking in a movie. (Robin Rosaaen Collection)
In mid-December 1956, on his way to the Louisiana Hayride with film director Hal Kanter, Elvis stopped at the Trio Club in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, to visit with the Browns (from left), Jim Ed, Maxine, and Bonnie, an early sweetheart. (Courtesy of Maxine Brown)
When Las Vegas showgirl Dottie Harmony came to Memphis for Christmas 1956, it shattered Elvis’s relationships with June Juanico and Barbara Hearn. Gladys and Vernon share in the gift giving. (Paul Lichter’s Elvis Photo Archives/elvisunique.com)
Elvis took time on the set of Jailhouse Rock for a coffee break with costars Anne Neyland (left), whom he dated, and Judy Tyler, May–June, 1957. (Robin Rosaaen Collection)
On the set of Jailhouse Rock, Elvis became reacquainted with “stripper” Gloria Pall, who had called him a “corny, horny little hick” in Las Vegas the year before. (Robin Rosaaen Collection)
At Sy Devore’s Beverly Hills Halloween party, October 31, 1957, Elvis met actress Jeanne Carmen (right), who would later share steamy tales of their romance. He was rarely photographed with alcohol, but here holds a beer. (Earl Leaf, Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
Gladys wipes away a tear as Elvis departs for Fort Chaffee to begin his army life, March 1958. Anita Wood (left) comforts her, as Vernon looks on. There to see Elvis off was Judy Spreckels (with headscarf), his double cousin Patsy Presley (middle), and his aunt, Mrs. Vester Presley. Alan Fortas can be seen at rear left. (Don Cravens, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
While Elvis was in Germany, Anita Wood, shown here Christmas shopping in 1958, pursued a television career. The two exchanged a series of emotional letters during his tour of duty overseas. (From the author’s collection)
Fourteen-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu helps Elvis’s grandmother, Minnie Mae Presley, to the car in front of his house in West Germany, March 1960. They would see Elvis off at the plane for his return to the United States. (James Whitmore, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
When Elvis addressed the Tennessee state legislature in March 1961, he became smitten with Ann Ellington, daughter of Governor Buford Ellington. They enjoyed a long friendship. (Courtesy of David Troedson/Elvis Australia)
G.I. Blues, Elvis’s first post-army film, paired him with actress-dancer Juliet Prowse in May 1960. Elvis found her “one cold chick,” but soon warmed her up. (Robin Rosaaen Collection)
Joan Blackman, on location with Elvis in the fiftieth state, April 1961. She helped make Blue Hawaii, his first bikini picture, his most popular film. (Robin Rosaaen Collection)
Priscilla as the well-dressed young lady, Memphis, early 1960s. (Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
The film Roustabout was conceived as a nod to Colonel Parker (shown here with Elvis and Barbara Stanwyck, spring 1964) and his carnival past. (From the author’s collection)
But Elvis got a number one soundtrack out of Roustabout—and a chance to pose with real live Kewpie dolls. (Robin Rosaaen Collection)
Elvis and Priscilla tie the knot, May 1, 1967, at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas. All of the entourage (with the exception of Red West) attended the reception afterward. From left: Richard Davis, Jerry Schilling, George Klein, Joe Esposito, Priscilla, Elvis, Charlie Hodge, and Marty Lacker. Joe and Marty served as co-best men. (Robin Rosaaen Collection)
Baby Lisa Marie was delivered at Baptist Hospital in Memphis, February 1, 1968, nine months to the day after her parents wed. Elvis later called her “t
he love of my life.” (Keystone/Staff, Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
On Live a Little, Love a Little, filmed in spring 1968, Elvis made an important friend in actress Susan Henning. (Courtesy of Susan Henning and Rodney Woliver)
He also became close on Live a Little, Love a Little with Celeste Yarnall, who says, “He made me feel like I was the only woman in the world.” (Courtesy of Celeste Yarnall)
With his 1972 separation from Priscilla, Elvis’s health began to fail. That June, hardly resembling himself, he rode his motorcycle around Memphis with twenty-year-old dancer Mary Kathleen Selph. She was killed in an auto accident the following month. (Dave Darnell/the Commercial Appeal)
