by Alanna Nash
“It became like the First and Second Family,” Lamar says. “It just galled Billy and Marty, and I wouldn’t put up with it. I told them all to go fuck themselves.”
Suddenly, there were rules. Only Joe and Priscilla were allowed to take pictures of Elvis, according to Billy, “and then after they took them, you couldn’t even get a copy of them. Same with home movies.”
In general, Elvis did not want the wives to come out to California or accompany their husbands on trips. “He was going to play around, and he didn’t want anybody carrying tales,” as Lamar puts it. “Being with Elvis put a hell of a strain on a marriage. And on being a family. I was home so infrequently that my kids would see an extra place at the table and wonder who was coming.”
Billy’s wife, Jo, was especially hurt over the way Elvis excluded the wives, as many of the guys now had families, and he didn’t always seem to respect those ties. She also thought she was in a vulnerable position because of Elvis’s closeness to Billy. Though the two men were first cousins, Elvis regarded him as a brother, someone he had reared and guided from the days when they first came to Memphis and lived in the slums. “I saved you,” Elvis told him over and over.
“Elvis couldn’t live without Billy,” says Jo. Part of it was the connection to Elvis’s past, especially to Gladys, since Billy had been close to her. Part of it also was that Elvis’s father and Billy’s father had been in prison together, so there was nothing that Elvis had to be ashamed of with him. Consequently, Elvis wanted Billy with him all the time, and he resented it when Billy got married.
“Sometimes Elvis was like the Devil to me,” Jo admits. “I pitied him, but I also feared him. I knew the power he had over everybody who worked for him, including my husband. When he took him on trips, it was like he was taking him from me, because I lived by myself in Memphis while Billy lived in California. When our first child was born, Elvis wouldn’t let Billy come home. And I didn’t understand that. I lived in fear that Elvis would win and take Billy away forever. Patsy Lacker, Marty’s wife, was my best friend then. Patsy used to say Elvis made her a hateful person, even to herself. We threw rocks at the bus and wished them all dead.”
Jo Fortas, Alan’s wife, was also at her wit’s end. Alan had developed a frightening dependency on pills, usually downers—hypnotics—though he’d take uppers when driving cross-country, and Jo didn’t know how to handle him. She’d call Red or Marty when things got really out of hand, and one of them would have to go over to their apartment on Beverly Glen Boulevard and search for the pills and flush them down the toilet. Usually it was Marty. “We had to haul Alan over to UCLA Medical Center in ’65. He had thirty-five yellow jackets in him. Tried to kill himself over this tug-of-war between Elvis and his wife. Alan had six, seven, maybe eight real good scares.”
To alleviate some of the tension, Elvis would invite Jo Smith to live in the house in L.A. in the mid-1960s. Lamar thought it made her seem like one of the guys. But Jo thought Elvis was jealous of how close she and Billy were. He wanted a similar closeness with just one woman, she could see. “But he wanted the closeness to be just on the wife’s part.”
That May, Elvis began work on Frankie and Johnny at MGM, where he became the first star in studio history to have two dressing rooms—one for himself, and one for the guys. The irony was not lost upon him that Tony Curtis’s dressing room had been prepared for him.
Directed by Freddy De Cordova, whose credits included Bedtime for Bonzo and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, Frankie and Johnny was a comedic turn on the old folk song by the same name, recast as Victorian period froth. Donna Douglas (Frankie) and Elvis (Johnny) appear as riverboat performers whose lives change when dancer Nellie Bly joins the troupe.
During production, Elvis and Donna (“Elly May” from The Beverly Hillbillies) squirreled away to discuss all things metaphysical. But Lamar saw that “he didn’t try to date her. She was a smart cookie, and she knew about as much as he did, so they just talked books and religion.”
On Perugia Way, Elvis was reading Timothy Leary’s Psychedelic Experience and Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, and encouraging Red, Sonny, and Alan to drop LSD while he watched. He tried smoking pot, though it burned his throat. But when he and Priscilla innocently got into a batch of Lamar’s marijuana brownies, they didn’t come out of the bedroom for days. “They just stayed ripped the whole time.” Shaking, Lamar went in and confessed what had happened, expecting to be fired. Instead, “Elvis held out the tray and he said, ‘Lamar, put another ounce in there.’ ”
Sue Ane Langdon, in her second picture with Elvis, remembered that he was “never really taxed” to do much on the film. “He was quite natural as himself . . . and I think Elvis played Elvis the best that anybody could ever have played him.”
Elvis seemed to just be sailing through both his life and his film roles in the mid-1960s. But by late July, when his next picture, Paradise, Hawaiian Style, was scheduled to go into production, he was in trouble.
Like Alan and others of his group, Elvis was experimenting with barbiturates, particularly Seconal and Tuinal. Uppers had helped him keep his body trim, but downers slowed his metabolism while he continued to eat such typical lunches as a bowl of mashed potatoes, a side boat of gravy, nine slices of bacon, a quart of milk, a lettuce salad with dressing, tomato juice, and six slices of bread. For breakfast, he often upped his bacon intake to an entire pound.
He showed up at Paramount for preproduction on August 2, a week late, citing illness. His appearance was shocking. He looked jowly and puffy in the face, soft around the waist, and he perspired so heavily that he frequently changed his shirts. Director Mickey Moore, who had worked as assistant director to Norman Taurog on a number of Presley pictures, was appalled. Elvis was to play a helicopter pilot with a tourist-related charter business, which required him to look lean, handsome, and rugged. Instead, in costume, he was so pudgy, with visible pooches of fat, that he split his pants.
Producer Hal Wallis was livid. He had been steadily complaining about Elvis’s weight to the Colonel since before Roustabout. The two were friendly adversaries, and he had warned Parker in late 1963 that he needed to have a stern talk with his client, and that if Elvis didn’t shape up, “It could have a very detrimental effect on his entire career.” On one occasion, Wallis sent his sister, Mina, to the Samuel Goldwyn Studios to check up on him. She greeted Elvis warmly and then stood with her arm around him in conversation. When she left, Elvis went berserk. “That goddamn old fucking bitch!” he spewed to Marty. “She was feeling to see how much fat I had around my waist!”
Paradise, Hawaiian Style was the last picture in Elvis’s revised 1961 contract with Wallis, and during filming, the Colonel would enter into arduous negotiations with him on a new deal—$500,000 per picture, plus 20 percent of the profits. He also wanted one nonsinging role for his client. The producer would stall him until the following year.
On August 5, Elvis, Priscilla, Vernon, and Dee flew to Hawaii for location shooting. Jerry Schilling, Larry Geller, Red and Sonny West, Charlie Hodge, Mike Keaton, Richard Davis, Marty Lacker, and Billy Smith went with them.
Jo Smith was pregnant with their second child, and she stayed in California with Patsy Lacker and her three children. “Patsy and I depended on each other.” Like Elvis and Gladys, “We even had our own little lingo that only we understood.” It was Jo’s first time on the West Coast (“I’d never been anywhere before”), and the Watts riots broke out while the guys were gone. Thirty-four people were killed, more than a thousand injured, and nearly four thousand arrested. Jo was terrified, wondering what in the world she’d gotten herself into.
In Hawaii, the movie set was also fraught with little wars and dramas, as Elvis juggled friendships of one kind or another with three starlets—Suzanna Leigh, Julie Parrish, and Marianna Hill—and a child actress, Donna Butterworth.
Priscilla rarely visited the set, which might have boded well for Elvis’s flirtation with twenty-four-year-ol
d Marianna, whose exotic looks and long, dark hair set her apart from the more conventional Julie and Suzanna. The problem was that she didn’t find him impressive either personally or professionally and considered him little more than “a show business phenomenon.” Marianna, whose real surname was Schwarzkopf (her cousin H. Norman Schwarzkopf, would become commander of the Coalition Forces in the Gulf War of 1991), had a sexy dance number with Elvis, “Scratch My Back (Then I’ll Scratch Yours).” That led reporters to ask if the two might schedule some private time off the set. “No,” she answered, indicating that she found his ubiquitous entourage too strange for that sort of thing.
Elvis didn’t end up dating any of the film’s actresses, though he might have easily made time with either Suzanna or Julie, both of whom had been fans since their teen years. Suzanna, a Brit born in Redding, England, was the goddaughter of actress Vivian Leigh, from whom she took her stage name. She had grown up dreaming of winning a Paramount Studios contract, or more specifically, of making a film with Elvis. Paradise, Hawaiian Style was her second American movie. She played Elvis’s girlfriend, Judy, who ran the office in his helicopter charter service.
Suzanna began appearing in British productions at eleven, but now at nineteen, the show business veteran was still nervous about meeting her childhood idol. She planned to tell him that they had a good friend in common, actress-turned-nun Dolores Hart, but she never got a chance to deliver her prepared speech. She was on the set the first day, studying her lines, when suddenly a hand holding a cup of tea appeared before her face.
“I believe everyone from England drinks tea,” said a male voice.
Suzanna began speaking before she looked up. “No,” she said, “I don’t, actually . . .” But then she saw him. “Oh, yes, I do! Yes, yes, I love tea!”
They found an easy rapport, as Suzanna was a strong believer in spiritualism and held a deep faith. “We talked a lot about religion. I had a rough childhood. I found my father dead when I was six. I had a religious experience in a convent when I was small, so Elvis was fascinated by that. He said that he had been searching for someone who could give him facts that Jesus did exist.”
During their heart-to-hearts, Suzanna suggested that Elvis expand his repertoire and come to England, “because there were a lot of great movies being done there.” Colonel Parker, who had entered the country illegally from Holland and had no passport to travel, felt threatened by her and, according to Suzanna, fabricated a magazine article in which it seemed that she had “sold Elvis out. There was one thing that Elvis would not let you do, and that was speak to the press about him. If you did, he would drop you like a hot potato.”
When Parker had someone slip a copy of the article beneath her dressing room door, “I was in a terrible state over it.” She figured Elvis would never speak to her again. But instead, when he walked on the set, “He came up and flicked my bra strap and said for me to go with him.”
When he got her alone, she was nearly in tears. “I never said those things!”
“Don’t worry,” Elvis said. “I know where it came from.”
He saved her a second time on the Paramount lot when Steve McQueen wouldn’t leave her alone. Grabbing her by the hand, he led her to his photo session, where suddenly he took her in his arms and kissed her for the camera.
“This won’t do your career any harm, baby!”
Elvis also had a swoon-inducing effect on Julie Parrish, who had joined a fan club for him at thirteen. When she first met him on the set, “My heart was beating so fast I was afraid he could hear it. . . . He did not seem that comfortable with me at first, but then I was not all that comfortable with him, either, to say the least.”
They warmed up to each other, though, and Julie was only too eager to listen to Elvis carry on about metaphysical studies. Then one day she became unwell, following a rough patch with Hal Wallis.
Despite being married, the “old letch,” as she called Wallis, kept putting the moves on her. Shortly before the film went into production, “He called me into his office, locked the door behind us, led me over to the sofa, and briefly kissed me on the mouth. He said, ‘Little, girl, we’re going to have a long talk about your future.’ I looked at my watch and apologized, saying I’d like to stay and talk, but that I really had an audition I had to get to.”
He continued to pursue her on location, “constantly calling and asking me out. . . . On his last call . . . he said, ‘You’d better think again.’ I think the stress of all this nonsense contributed to my becoming ill during that film.”
When she and Elvis rehearsed the musical number “Stop Where You Are,” they stood for hours on end, doing the scene repeatedly. Julie felt a sharp pain in her leg, and soon it crept up the right side of her body. The actress had just gotten out of the hospital, so the experience scared her.
“I complained of it and had to sit down.” When she said she couldn’t go on, “Elvis came over, picked me up in his arms, carried me to his dressing room and laid me down on his sofa. He then tried to do a healing. He held his hands about a foot above my body for a while, but I was so nervous, worrying about what everyone on the set must be thinking, that I couldn’t enjoy it.” Being in his arms, she confessed, “was almost scary to me.”
When she got back to the mainland, she went into the hospital for tests and was told she might have suffered a slight stroke. She had another idea: “My intuition told me that it had to do with taking [the sedative] Librium, diet pills, and drinking alcohol. . . . I had also been taking tranquilizers since the age of fourteen.”
Elvis could identify with both of Julie’s problems. His own difficulties with Wallis were apparent to everyone, even ten-year-old Donna Butterworth. She and Elvis were rehearsing the song “Queenie Wahini’s Papaya” when the producer appeared on the set. Suddenly, Elvis’s demeanor changed, and as Donna remembers, “he did not dig it that [Wallis] was there. He got miffed and wouldn’t continue until he left.” She never knew the reason behind it, but Elvis stormed off and went to his trailer, all the guys following behind him. When Wallis left, they resumed their rehearsal as if nothing had happened.
Elvis always made time for the pint-size performer, particularly after she got upset with him one day. She had already met Priscilla and found her “classy and quiet, but a lovely person.” But watching Elvis kiss all the girls confused her, since he’d told her that he and Priscilla would eventually marry.
“How can Elvis kiss and be nice to the other girls on the set when he is supposed to be with Priscilla?” she wondered.
One day he invited Donna to lunch in his dressing room, making sure he had the Mexican food she enjoyed from Del Taco.
“Little sister, I can see something’s bothering you. What’s going on?”
She told him. Elvis took her question seriously.
“Well, you know, sweetheart, the Lord wants you to love everybody as your brothers and sisters. But really, we are in love with one person, and for me that is Priscilla.”
Looking back, she says, “The King of Rock and Roll explained the whole love thing to me over tacos and cheeseburgers in his dressing room for an hour. If that’s not something to remember, I don’t know what is.”
On one of his days off, Elvis went with the Colonel to see the recently completed memorial to the U.S.S. Arizona, which Elvis had helped fund with his 1961 benefit concert. Parker had designed an enormous bell-shaped wreath for the occasion, with one carnation for each of the 1,177 men who died there, and an admiral gave Elvis and his party a special tour on his private boat. Jerry Schilling remembers standing next to Elvis at the rail as they looked down through the water at the sunken ship. They were both surprised to see oil from the engines still bubbling up to the surface. Elvis was visibly moved. “Those guys are still down there,” he said, speaking very softly.
He couldn’t get it out of his head and talked about it when he got back to L.A. But when Suzanna Leigh returned home, all she talked about was Elvis. One woman in particular hun
g on every detail. Suzanna was among a group of film stars, including Deborah Kerr, to be presented to Queen Elizabeth. Nervous, Suzanna walked up to Her Royal Highness and curtsied, but before anything else could happen, the queen gushed forth: “Do tell me all about Elvis Presley. . . . What we all want to know is whether he is going to come over here.”
Queen Elizabeth was not the only British subject eager to meet Elvis. On August 27, under heavy secrecy and security, the Beatles made a visit to Perugia Way. In a sense, their visit was anticlimactic—at first, the Fab Four seemed too awestruck to speak. Elvis, clad in a red shirt and gray slacks, was sitting on the couch, his leg constantly twitching, while the Beatles nervously came and sat cross-legged in a semicircle on the floor. “There was a silence, and they were looking up at him, no they were gaping at him,” remembers Larry Geller. “He out-eclipsed everyone, and they knew it.” Finally Elvis stood up and said, “If you guys are just going to stare at me all night, I’m going to bed.”
That broke the ice, and then Elvis, John, and Paul picked up guitars in the den and played three songs, “Memphis, Tennessee,” “Johnny B. Goode,” and “See, See Rider,” with Elvis on bass. Elsewhere in the house, Ringo, Marty, and Billy shot a bit of pool, while the Colonel, Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein, Alan, and Joe spent the evening playing roulette and shooting craps. Larry, hoping to talk with George about metaphysics, followed him outside, where the quiet Beatle smoked a joint by himself under a tree. The next day John, who had famously remarked that “Before Elvis, there was nothing,” told Marty it was the best night of his life. Paul would later call it “odd.”
Just before they left, Elvis took the Beatles in the back of the house to show them a gift from the Colonel, a large wooden sauna, stationed outside his bedroom. Larry went along. “We all walked through this long hallway up to the sauna, which had a little glass window. Paul looked in, and he turned to Elvis, and he said, ‘Who’s that?’ We opened the door, and there was a fourteen-year-old girl, huddled down in a fetal position. She jumped up, and screamed, and lunged at Elvis, and someone pulled her away. Elvis said, ‘Don’t hurt her! Don’t hurt her! She’s only a fan.’ He was so protective. It was really beautiful. But no one ever figured out how this girl got into the house. It was impossible, with the security.”
