Elvis Presley

by Williamson, Joel

  “You’re fired,” Elvis would yell.

  “You can’t fire me, I quit,” the other would yell back.

  The firings seldom lasted long.

  Elisabeth was enthralled by Elvis. She willingly accepted the limits he imposed upon her and even forgave his sudden, emotionally violent, and cruel rages over the most trivial things. On one occasion, they were shopping at the Post Exchange. He wanted to buy another wastebasket for his room. Elisabeth suggested that he did not need another wastebasket.

  “Don’t ever … ,” Elvis exploded and warned her never to challenge him. Never.

  When displeased, he did this with everyone in his circle. Lamar said he would kill a fly with a sledgehammer. Sometimes he would show great anger at one person while he winked at another as if to assure him that he was especially favored. Such performances, of course, were just another way of maintaining control over his coterie.

  In time, Elisabeth came to follow her feelings for one of the young men among Elvis’s guys, Rex Mansfield. He returned her sentiments in full measure. Rex, like Elvis, was a draftee and had served with him from the day both left the induction center in Memphis for Fort Hood in Texas. He was intelligent, clean-cut, and handsome. Elvis was very fond of him and called him “Rexadus.” Rex could attract girls without Elvis’s help. His superiors made him a tank commander while Elvis was still driving a jeep for his sergeant. Rex’s success caused some resentment on Elvis’s part, but Rex was impossible to hate. Elvis decided that the army favored Rex because Rex was his friend. Elvis took Rex on junkets to Munich and Paris, where the boys eschewed all the famous sights—no Louvre, no Eiffel Tower—slept all day, enjoyed the clubs all night, and brought girls back to their hotel.

  All during his European stay, Elvis was obviously nonplussed by a European attitude that sex outside of marriage could be something less than a cardinal sin. Indeed, the clubs in Munich and Paris seemed to celebrate sex as if it were a thing unto itself and had nothing at all to do with social propriety, morality, or religion. These people appeared to feel no guilt at all about any kind of sex, homo or hetero, solo or group, masochistic or sadistic. Elvis tried hard, but he never quite knew what to do with it all. There are photographs of him with the girls in the Moulin Rouge in Munich in which he looks like a man who does not know how to perform with them in an appropriate way. His whole body seems limp. He had exhausted himself and could do no more among these women who seem so worldly-wise and so physically feminine. Perhaps, among other things, he had caught a glimpse of the erotic and exciting possibilities of mixing sex and pain.

  What Elvis saw in the nightclubs of Europe was so unlike American sex, so unlike back-seat, drive-in-movie love-making, so unlike Tupelo and Memphis and even Las Vegas, that he seemed staggered. In America, he was broadly recognized as the king of sex; his girlfriends had applauded his performances often enough to convince him that he was highly talented. But here he was not even a prince, much less the king. In Europe, apparently, men often rose to heights he had never achieved in America. Moreover, they did it in ways that he had never dreamed of. Europeans did it all more honestly, more gracefully, with less fumbling, and with variations that he could hardly imagine. If European men did what a man should do, Elvis was still a teenage boy.

  In Europe, Elvis protected himself successfully from European influence. He took not the slightest interest in its art and architecture. He learned nothing of its history and culture. He lived in Germany for a year and a half and seemed not to have absorbed even a respectful smattering of the German language. Instead, he constructed and lived within his small, tight Elvisian universe. In Germany, Minnie Mae cooked for him the fat-laden Southern meals he found so satisfying. He surrounded himself with guys, all Americans and young, who shared his values and inflated his ego. He took refuge in a domestic construct in which he could entertain the girls and did not feel threatened. After a year in Europe, Elvis was still sexually at sea. It was a sea that he did not understand. It confused and threatened him. In the crisis, Priscilla Beaulieu, a purely American girl, came to him like a gift from heaven. She was absolutely, almost miraculously, the perfect solution for him in his time of great need. In September 1959, she was barely fourteen years old and already a stunning—though miniature—beauty. She was very young, a child really, and totally malleable. She became Elvis’s willing clay.

  Back to Elisabeth

  Elisabeth Stefaniak shared the secret of her love for Rex Mansfield with “Grandma” Presley, who encouraged the relationship. When Elvis returned to America, Elisabeth came with him, ostensibly slated to continue her service as his private secretary. She rode around Memphis with Elvis on his motorcycle, sitting behind him, her arms wrapped around his middle. He gave her a new yellow Lincoln and lessons on how to drive it. After a week, amazingly, he told her she could date other men. She immediately called Rex, who had returned to his hometown to work for the company he had left two years before. He had turned down an offer from Elvis to work for him as a kind of “foreman” of the guys, a job that soon fell to Joe Esposito, another of Elvis’s army buddies.

  Rex appeared at Graceland just in time to help Elvis dress for a night at the movies. With great trepidation—as he was helping Elvis adjust his suspenders—Rex said that he would like to go out with Elisabeth that evening, somewhere where they could be alone. Elvis fell silent for a long moment while Rex waited. Finally, he responded. “Rexadus, you know Elisabeth will never love anybody but me,” he said, looking at himself in the mirror and striking an admiring pose. Rex replied that he just thought Elisabeth needed a break. Elvis said he was glad that Rex was taking her out because he knew that he would always treat Elisabeth like a lady. He meant there would be no sex.

  The next day, Elisabeth was sitting in a car in front of Graceland about to flee from Elvis and rejoin Rex. Elisabeth had put out the story that she was going to see her parents, who were visiting in Florida and in the process of relocating in America. At the last moment, Elvis came running out of the house and brought her back inside. As usual, one of the guys had ratted on her to make points with the boss. Looking her straight in the eye, she recalled, Elvis asked her if she was going to meet Rex. She lied convincingly, and Elvis let her go. Elisabeth and Rex married within three months, sending Elvis an invitation to the wedding that went unanswered. Except for receiving one of the stock autographed photos sent out the next Christmas by the staff, they never heard from Elvis again.

  Anita Wood

  Elvis could let Elisabeth Stefaniak go because he had Anita Wood ready and waiting in Memphis. Anita had been waiting, in fact, for the two years that Elvis was in the army. She was a crowned beauty queen from Jackson, Tennessee, who aspired to make a career for herself as a singer. In July 1957, at nineteen, she was cohost on a Memphis television show, the Top Ten Dance Party. Elvis saw her on the TV screen and got George Klein to bring her out to his new home, Graceland. He began a serious courtship immediately. They drove downtown to see a giant cut-out of Elvis at the theater where his first movie, Loving You, was about to premiere. Then he took her to a drive-in restaurant where they always served Elvis in a private dining room inside. Then he showed her Graceland room by room, talking all the time. When Anita told him she did not feel comfortable lingering in his bedroom (with the nine-foot-square bed), they descended to the living room and spent the evening talking and singing at the piano. In the end, Elvis himself, not Lamar Fike or another of the guys, drove her to her rooming house, a proper establishment run by Mrs. J. B. Patty. As they parted, Elvis received a chaste kiss. Anita Wood, it seems, was Dixie Locke’s successor as a potential wife.

  The courtship of Anita during the summer of 1957 was strikingly classic, including her meeting his parents under the most favorable conditions Elvis could imagine. It also included the usual confessional in which he charmingly revealed his human vulnerabilities despite his greatness. Elvis took Anita and his parents together to a private showing of Loving You. He drove her about Memphis in a
panel truck—such as he had driven for Crown Electric—to see all the places he had lived and frequented, including the route he had walked between one of his homes and the grocery store. The panel truck allowed them to move about the city unrecognized and without his usual entourage of young men. He told her everything about himself from infancy on. He confessed his great dread of entering the army, an emotion he could not express in public without contradicting the perfectly patriotic image that he and the Colonel were carefully projecting. He gave her a pet name, “Little,” inspired by the size of her feet. He greatly admired his mother’s small feet, and he and Anita began to talk baby talk to each other as he and Gladys did.

  Gladys liked Anita a lot, seeing in her a likely lifelong mate for her son. Elvis would marry Anita, she decided, settle down, and begin a family. “I just can’t wait,” she told Anita, “to see that little ol’ baby walking up and down the driveway.” Anita was frequently at Graceland, and she noticed that Gladys was often sick and stayed in her room. Her ankles and legs were swollen, she was overweight, and she had heart trouble. “She never ceased to worry about Elvis,” Anita recalled, but she never suspected that Gladys had a problem with alcohol.

  Unlike Dixie, Anita happily joined Elvis’s all-male Memphis gang. The boys swirled around her and Elvis as if they were the golden couple in a high school senior class. They all went to the movies, the drive-in, the roller rink, the amusement park, McKellar Lake. Now and again, Elvis would take advantage of Anita’s innocence to amuse the boys. Riding in the back seat of the car with the gang all around them, he would have her call out, “My cunt hurts,” without knowing what she was saying. The boys thought it was hilarious.

  Lamar Fike was glued to Elvis by then. George Klein continued to balance his disc-jockeying career with adhering to Elvis as closely as he could. In 1956, George brought Cliff Gleaves to Elvis. Cliff was a young man, a disc jockey in the region, and an entertainer who imitated the voices of famous people. He was always desperately seeking some way to break into the big time. Cliff sensed that Elvis was his ticket to success and hung around in Memphis until he met Elvis, who liked him immediately. On the very same day that Elvis first had Cliff out to his house for a visit, he had him move out of his room in the Memphis YMCA and into one of the three bedrooms in the Presley house on Audubon Drive.

  George Klein also brought in Alan Fortas. Part of Memphis’s affluent and cultured Jewish community, Alan had been an All-City Tackle at Central High School, and Elvis had seen him play. Afterward, he had attended first Vanderbilt University and then Southwestern College in Memphis, but dropped out finally to work in his uncle’s junkyard, where, happily for Elvis biographers, he happened to find Elvis’s high school report cards and preserve them. Unlike Cliff, Alan did not plot to meet Elvis. His opportunity came because his friend George Klein could not drive a car. George always needed a ride, and often he needed a ride to Graceland. One day he asked Alan if he would like to meet Elvis. Elvis took to Alan right away and invited him back. Alan became one of “the guys,” dubbed “Hog Ears” by Elvis.

  By the fall of 1957, everyone understood that Anita was Elvis’s girl and assumed that she and Elvis would someday marry. But, as the guys knew, there were many other girls and young women for Elvis on the road and even at Graceland—under Anita’s nose. Elvis had seen disc jockey Betty Maddox on local television and had her over from time to time. If Anita called while she was there, he would have one of the guys say that he was tied up for the evening. Venetia Stevenson, a movie star, also came for a visit. Compared to what came later, Elvis was discreet about these affairs, since Graceland was still Gladys’s home. Gladys had laid down the law: there would be no “slut parties” at Graceland while she lived there.

  There was one very odd kind of party that Elvis recurrently had at Graceland that was not forbidden by Gladys. On occasional evenings, Elvis had a trio of fourteen-year-old girls join him in his bedroom for pillow fights, tickling, kissing, and cuddling. If one of the girls got nervous while wrestling with the twenty-two-year-old, 180-pound Presley, one of the girls later recalled, “all you’d have to say is ‘Stop!’ and he’d roll over and quit.” It fell to Lamar to drive these girls home at the end of the evening. Actually, these games had begun a year before when the girls were thirteen and visited Elvis on Audubon Drive for the same kind of fun. Elvis knew them because the father of one ran an auto repair shop that Vernon patronized. Somehow, this made everything all right.

  Anita seemed unaware of the magnitude of Elvis’s interest in other girls and young women, and their romance seemed to flower. By the end of August 1957, Elvis was telling reporters that “Anita is number one with me—strictly tops.” As his train left Memphis for his return to Hollywood, the local press reported that Anita “burst into tears and Mrs. Presley put her arms around her.” Soon Anita visited him in Hollywood, and he gave her a “very expensive” diamond and sapphire ring. Just before he went into the army, he gave her a car, and on the last night they and the boys went to a drive-in movie and the skating rink. Before he finally left the rink, Elvis got in and out of the car three times, so reluctant was he to surrender the pleasant diversions he had enjoyed over the last few years.

  Anita visited Elvis and the Presleys in Texas while Elvis was in training. It was as if she were already one of the family. When Gladys died, she was in New York preparing to appear on The Andy Williams Show, a major event in her rising career as a singer. Immediately after the show, she flew to Memphis, arriving at Graceland at 2:30 a.m. to find Elvis and Vernon sitting on the front steps. Elvis brought her in to see the body. “Look at her little sooties [feet], Little,” he urged. “Look at her little sooties, she’s so precious.”

  Home again in Memphis in the spring of 1960, Elvis let Elisabeth Stefaniak go and resumed his relationship with the virginal Anita. Anita was taken aback by her first sight of Elisabeth. She had been led to believe that Elisabeth was a drab secretarial type, the opposite of the very attractive young woman she was. But Elvis showered Anita with attention, and they were soon back where they had left off. The whole world assumed that she and Elvis would marry, and so did she.

  Over the months, Anita slowly began to realize that there were other women in Elvis’s life and at least one of those relationships was serious. During one trip to Hollywood, she discovered a letter from Priscilla Beaulieu begging Elvis to bring her over for a visit. In March 1960, she had seen the girl in a photograph in Life magazine, a tearful young teenager crying after Elvis as he boarded the plane to fly home. Elvis explained to Anita that the child simply had a crush on him. He continued that story as well as concocting other stories to explain all the women circling about. Finally, Anita realized that Elvis would not marry her in the foreseeable future, if ever, and she was eager to marry and begin a family.

  It was time to end the relationship, she decided. In August she invited Elvis and Vernon to sit down with her at the table in the dining room at Graceland and gave them the news. It’s over, Anita said. Both Vernon and Elvis expressed their regret at her decision. Elvis expressed his a bit too easily. He announced his hope that he was doing the right thing in letting her go. Then he did let her go. Anita arranged for her brother to come and pick up her things. Unlike Elisabeth, it seems that Anita did not sleep with Elvis. Nor did she have sex with him. She exited his life as she had entered it—virginal.

  Anita went back to her hometown, Jackson, Tennessee. She had invested heavily in Elvis and lost. She lost a year and a half before Elvis went overseas, a year and a half while he was overseas in the army, and then two years after he came back. Five years was a long time to wait for him. When she recovered, she married a man who played baseball with the Cleveland Indians.

  Priscilla: The Feminine Elvis

  Elvis could let the virginal Anita go because now he had the virginal Priscilla. They had stayed in touch since his departure from Germany. She wrote him on stand-out pink stationery that allowed Joe Esposito to pluck her letters out from
the great piles of fan mail. Finally, Elvis persuaded Priscilla’s father, Captain Beaulieu, to allow him to bring her over for a two-week visit in Hollywood at the end of June 1962. The captain accepted a story that Elvis concocted. She was to stay at the home of the man who customized vehicles for Elvis and be chaperoned by the man and his wife. Of course, Priscilla, now seventeen, was with Elvis the whole time after the first night, most of it in Las Vegas, not Hollywood. Anita, meanwhile, was back at Graceland.

  On August 6, within weeks of Priscilla’s visit, Anita announced her breakup with Elvis in the Memphis Press-Scimitar. Elvis was now totally free. He barraged Priscilla’s father with phone calls asking him to let her return for Christmas. Again, he prevailed. She came for three weeks, beginning just before Christmas and staying into the New Year, 1963. He showed Priscilla Graceland and his favorite spots around town. As the time neared for her return, he called Captain Beaulieu begging for permission to extend her stay. The captain was unmoved and Elvis was furious.

  After Priscilla flew back to Europe, Elvis mounted the campaign for her return. This time the pitch to her parents was that she would come to America to complete her education in Memphis in the highly respected Catholic high school for girls, Immaculate Conception, thereby facilitating the expected return of the Beaulieu family from Germany when the captain was reassigned in America. Her tenure at Immaculate Conception would not be long, less than three months, since graduation would occur in May. Elvis assured Priscilla’s parents that she would live with and be chaperoned by his father and his father’s new wife, Dee Stanley. Elvis hated Dee, and he hated that his father had taken up with her so soon after Gladys’s death. But now that she had divorced the army sergeant and married Vernon, he painted them as a happy, settled couple successfully engaged in rearing three sterling young boys from Dee’s previous marriage, Billy, David, and Ricky.