Baby, Let's Play House Part 26

Chapter Twenty-Two.

"A Little Happiness"

By the time Priscilla arrived for a two-week visit on June 17, 1962, she was no longer a fourteen-year-old girl. Elvis may have still thought of her that way, and even preferred for her to remain fourteen, which could be why he referenced her as that age in his argument with Anita. But in truth, Priscilla had celebrated her seventeenth birthday three weeks earlier. And she was a far more experienced girl than the one who had stood at the air base in Germany and waved good-bye to her soldier boyfriend. a fourteen-year-old girl. Elvis may have still thought of her that way, and even preferred for her to remain fourteen, which could be why he referenced her as that age in his argument with Anita. But in truth, Priscilla had celebrated her seventeenth birthday three weeks earlier. And she was a far more experienced girl than the one who had stood at the air base in Germany and waved good-bye to her soldier boyfriend.

But she was also more insecure about her place in his life. When she saw him on the big screen kissing such glamorous movie stars as Juliet Prowse, Tuesday Weld, and Joan Blackman, she wondered how she could ever measure up to such women. She was a schoolgirl in Germany.

For "two torturous years," as she would put it, Elvis maintained only sporadic contact. Every day she waited for the mail, and every night she listened for the phone. He wasn't much of a letter writer, but he sent her records with clues in the song t.i.tles: "I'll Take Care of You," "Soldier Boy," "It's Now or Never," "Fever."

"When I didn't hear from him, I was heartbroken," she has written. "When I did, I was ecstatic." On the telephone, he a.s.sured her he still loved her, and no, he wasn't going with Nancy Sinatra or any of those actresses she had read about in Photoplay Photoplay magazine. He hadn't called for the past month because he was making a movie. It didn't mean anything. magazine. He hadn't called for the past month because he was making a movie. It didn't mean anything.

But her fear-or possibly her mother's fear-that he had lost interest in her spurred Priscilla to write the letter begging Elvis to bring her to the States. She didn't know what was going on or what to do. And neither did her parents, who must have weighed the predicament of whether it was better to have Priscilla consorting with reckless boys in Germany or with an international playboy ten years her senior.

Finally Elvis said he would work out the arrangements with her stepfather and send her a first-cla.s.s round-trip ticket to Los Angeles. "When Elvis wanted something with utter pa.s.sion," Priscilla says, "he could convince anyone of anything."

Now he went to work on both of Priscilla's parents, speaking with them at length. He wired Captain Beaulieu a detailed itinerary of where Priscilla would be every minute of her two-week trip. He also promised she would have round-the-clock chaperones-either Vernon and Dee, or George and Shirley Barris, who would open their Griffith Park home to her. The captain, so rigid and harsh at home that even his own family was afraid of him, said yes.

The reason, offers Joe Esposito, is not because Priscilla's parents promoted this relationship more than Priscilla, as some suggest, but because "they knew that the two of them were in love. And Elvis loved the military. He was a very patriotic guy, and he had a lot of respect for the captain, and the captain could tell that. So that made him feel good, too."

When the arrangements were in place, Elvis spoke with Patti and the other girls who regularly partied at the house. "I want you to know something," he said, sounding serious. "I met this girl in Germany and we've been talking on the phone a lot. I'm bringing her here." But during Priscilla's visit, the house would be family-oriented: the guys who were married, including Joe, would bring their wives over each night, and the parties would temporarily stop.

Still, there was the problem of Anita. Elvis always spent the Fourth of July in Memphis, but the holiday fell during Priscilla's trip to the States. So Joanie Esposito, Joe's wife, who was pregnant with their daughter, Debbie, was a.s.signed the task of keeping Anita occupied. If Joanie went to Memphis, Elvis figured, Anita would think he and the guys weren't far behind. He could deal with the fallout later.

When Joe picked Priscilla up at LAX that summer day, he found a nervous teenager who had no idea what to expect. He gave her a short tour of Los Angeles, taking her by the film studios where Elvis made his movies, and then speeding along Sunset Strip to the wrought-iron gates of Bel Air and on to the mansion on Bellagio Road. In Joe's memory, "She pretty well didn't say too much. Whatever Elvis said was right, and she did it. Remember, Priscilla was young, naive, and shy, didn't know too much about the world, and was in awe of Elvis and of the life he was leading."

Indeed, even the airport seemed beautiful to her after the drabness of Germany, and when Elvis's butler, Jimmy, met her at the door ("Mr. P is in the den"), Priscilla could hardly believe such opulence. Joe led her downstairs, where she heard loud music and people laughing, and then she saw him, leaning over the pool table, ready to make a shot. His face lit up, and in dark trousers, a white shirt, a dark captain's hat on his newly black hair, he looked thinner and even more breathtaking than ever.

"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 embarra.s.sed 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 c.o.c.ky, with a quick temper. When a girl warned him to look out for a gla.s.s 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 pa.s.sionately 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 pa.s.sionate 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 s.e.x 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 pa.r.s.ed the meaning of what const.i.tutes s.e.x, 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 s.e.x, 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 s.e.xually 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 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." 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 cla.s.sic, 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-Bergere."

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

"G.o.dd.a.m.n, 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 p.i.s.s 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 compet.i.tion 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 G.o.d 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." n.o.body 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, 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. 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 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, 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 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 pa.s.sed 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 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. 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, 'G.o.d, 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 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." 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 door 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 b.u.t.tons 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 G.o.d, 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 gla.s.ses ("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.

"He was really obstreperous, this animal. He would pry your mouth open, looking for gum! And he would belly up to the bar and bang his gla.s.s, and they would give him hard liquor and he would drink it. Then when he would get tired of it, he would pour it on the floor. Today, that couldn't happen. Somebody would turn them in for animal abuse, because they shouldn't have been getting this chimp drunk. It's a wonder they didn't kill him. But n.o.body did anything about it, and this was somebody's rented house with this chimp loose in it."

In a little while, Elvis invited Yvonne to his bedroom on the pretense of getting away from Scatter. Soon, "there was kissing and hugging and stuff like that," but it wasn't particularly pa.s.sionate, and "there was no s.e.xual relationship at all." At twenty-five, Yvonne was two years younger than Elvis, yet she felt protective of him, and already the brunette sensed he liked her because she reminded him of Gladys. And so she launched into what she calls her "Mother Craig" lecture.

"I said, 'You know, Elvis, it's fine that you brought me here, but this is a dangerous move for you. You're just lucky I'm the way I am, because you have no idea. You should be very careful who you bring here, because you're in Hollywood now, and it's a terrible trap. If you take a girl alone back here in your quarters she can say anything happened-cry rape, scream, carry on-and the courts will say you did it. There will be horrible publicity, and you'll be in a lot of trouble. Do you do this often? I'm worried about you.'

"And I'm telling you, he sat there saying, 'Yes, ma'am, yes, ma'am.' "

On the way home, she suddenly became overwhelmed with embarra.s.sment. After all, he'd been in the business for years and knew all the pitfalls. But "it did occur to me that he needed talking to. He had such innocence that I thought, 'Oh, my G.o.d, I don't want anything bad to happen to him,' and he did encourage this sort of motherly interest in him." Besides, "I had seen some of the women the henchmen had in the house, and I thought, 'I know where they picked up those girls, and I know what they have on their minds, too.' "

However, before she left that night, Yvonne and Elvis found common ground. She mentioned that when she was a teenager, before ballet dancing led to acting, she thought about going to medical school. She'd had her Gray's Anatomy Gray's Anatomy and and Cecil-Loeb Cecil-Loeb since she was sixteen, she said, and to her surprise, "He dragged out medical books and started showing me." since she was sixteen, she said, and to her surprise, "He dragged out medical books and started showing me."

Scooting close to her, Elvis paged through his Physicians' Desk Reference Physicians' Desk Reference.

"Do you have any pills in your house that you can't identify?"

"I don't think so," she said.

"Well, if you do, this book will tell you what every one of them is."

"I thought he was interested in medicine, but now I think he was interested in what you can take to keep yourself skinny, and what you can take that won't be contraindicated with another drug and kill you."

Elvis was, indeed, studying to see what kinds of pills he could take and in what quant.i.ty to keep thin, stay up all night, and then rest enough to be bright-eyed on the set. Even so, he made some near-fatal errors.

According to Alan Fortas's memoir, Elvis: From Memphis to Hollywood, Elvis: From Memphis to Hollywood, one occurred that November 1962 on the drive home in the motor home. Elvis and the guys had gone to Las Vegas when filming wrapped on one occurred that November 1962 on the drive home in the motor home. Elvis and the guys had gone to Las Vegas when filming wrapped on It Happened at the World's Fair, It Happened at the World's Fair, staying up day and night to catch the shows, including Johnnie Ray at the Hacienda. staying up day and night to catch the shows, including Johnnie Ray at the Hacienda.

"Gene was wired from all the pills he was taking, plus all the extra that Elvis had given him. In fact, he'd been so wired for three days and two nights on speed that he couldn't sleep.

"We were in Arizona, and it was freezing outside. Elvis was driving the bus, and he gave Gene 500 milligrams of Demerol, a synthetic opiate. Gene took the little white pill and waited to fall asleep. But forty-five minutes later, when he was still stoked to the skies, Elvis gave him another hit. An hour went by, and Gene was still bouncing off the clouds-trying to fix stuff on the bus, working on things under Elvis's feet-trying to do everything, he was so out of it.

"Finally, Elvis told him, 'Look, Gene, go back in my bedroom, man, and get some sleep. Those pills will kick in before long.' So Gene went back in the bedroom, and after a while, Elvis told Billy to go check on him. In the meantime, Gene had opened the window, and a terrible draft had blown in on him. So when Billy tried to wake Gene up and couldn't-the stuff had finally hit him-he felt Gene's face, and it was just ice-cold. Gene's heartbeat had probably slowed down, and his breathing, too. But mostly he was cold from all that air coming in on him.

"Well, Billy just freaked out. It hadn't been that long since he'd found Junior dead in his bed, and he thought it had happened again. Billy came running back up to the front of the bus, yelling, 'Elvis! Elvis! I think Gene's dead! I shouted in his ear and he didn't move a muscle, and he's cold to the touch!' Elvis pulled over to the side of the road real quick, and he had his seat belt on, and he jumped up so fast the seat belt almost cut his d.a.m.n legs off.

"Of course, we all ran back there, but Gene wasn't dead. He was just cold from the window being open. He wasn't coming around, though, that was true, so we got him out and dragged him along the side of the highway. He was okay. He'd just been up for three days, and he had two big hits of Demerol in him. It scared the s.h.i.t out of Elvis, though. He said, 'G.o.dd.a.m.n, Gene, I ought to kill your a.s.s!' "

Two months earlier, while on the film set, Elvis gave an interview to Lloyd Shearer of of Parade Parade magazine, in which he mentioned that he often read medical texts and would have liked to become a doctor. He also talked about how males seemed to dislike him when he started out, but that his stint in the army changed that, along with "the fact that there's never anything about my thinking that I'm a lover or a ladies' man. I've never looked at, or thought of myself, as being a lady-killer or anything like that. And I've never shown it, that I know of." Finally, he talked about friends, saying, it was "important to surround yourself with people who can give you a little happiness." magazine, in which he mentioned that he often read medical texts and would have liked to become a doctor. He also talked about how males seemed to dislike him when he started out, but that his stint in the army changed that, along with "the fact that there's never anything about my thinking that I'm a lover or a ladies' man. I've never looked at, or thought of myself, as being a lady-killer or anything like that. And I've never shown it, that I know of." Finally, he talked about friends, saying, it was "important to surround yourself with people who can give you a little happiness."

Elvis thought he'd found more than that with Priscilla, who was coming for Christmas after all, even though the Beaulieus had never been apart for the holidays.

"At first, I said no," Ann Beaulieu remembers. "But when I saw how much it meant to her, I finally convinced my husband. It wasn't easy."

Vernon and Dee, who now had a home of their own near Graceland, flew to New York's Idlewild Airport to meet the pa.s.senger flying under the name of "Priscilla Fisher." They accompanied her to Memphis, and then Elvis asked her to wait at his father's house on Hermitage Road.

"I want to drive her through the gates," he said. "I want to see her face when she sees Graceland for the first time."

He had decorated the grounds with a life-size nativity scene and Santa's prancing reindeer, edging the walkways in blue lights for his song "Blue Christmas."

"When we drove through those gates and I saw the Christmas lights and glittering decorations on those long white columns," Priscilla later said, "I thought I was living inside a dream. Except the dream had come true. I had come home with Elvis."

Elvis and Ann-Margret's love affair on Viva Las Vegas, Viva Las Vegas, in the summer of 1963, carried over into real life. "It was a very strong relationship, very intense," she has said. He gave her a round bed. in the summer of 1963, carried over into real life. "It was a very strong relationship, very intense," she has said. He gave her a round bed. (Robin Rosaaen Collection) (Robin Rosaaen Collection)

Chapter Twenty-Three.