Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [0]
ELVIS
PRESLEY
and the
WOMEN
WHO LOVED HIM
Alanna NASH
For Rockin’ Robin Rosaaen,
Queen of all Elvisness, TCB
The world is so full of a number
of things.
I’m sure we should all
be as happy as kings.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
“Happy Thought,” from A Child’s Garden of Verses
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Epigraph
Introduction
Chapter One - “My Best Gal”
Chapter Two - An Ideal Guy
Chapter Three - Blue Heartache
Chapter Four - Dixie’s Delight
Chapter Five - “You Need to Be Kissed”
Chapter Six - “A Great, Big, Beautiful Hunk of Forbidden Fruit”
Chapter Seven - Biloxi Bliss
Chapter Eight - “An Earthquake in Progress”
Chapter Nine - Love Times Three
Chapter Ten - Hillbillies in Hollywood
Chapter Eleven - Showgirls and Shavers
Chapter Twelve - Twin Surprises
Chapter Thirteen - “The Most Miserable Young Man”
Chapter Fourteen - Nipper Dreams
Chapter Fifteen - Private Presley
Chapter Sixteen - “Wake up, Mama, Wake up”
Chapter Seventeen - Fräulein Fallout
Chapter Eighteen - House Full of Trouble
Chapter Nineteen - Priscilla
Chapter Twenty - “Crazy”
Chapter Twenty-One - Going Under
Chapter Twenty-Two - “A Little Happiness”
Chapter Twenty-Three - Nungin, Thumper, and Bug
Chapter Twenty-Four - Satyrs and Spirits
Photo Insert
Chapter Twenty-Five - “You Don’t Really Love Me!”
Chapter Twenty-Six - Hitched!
Chapter Twenty-Seven - A Baby, a Babe, and Black Leather
Chapter Twenty-Eight - Sin City
Chapter Twenty-Nine - Girls, Guns, and the President
Chapter Thirty - “A Prince from Another Planet ”
Chapter Thirty-One - Buntin’
Chapter Thirty-Two - “Where Does Love Go? ”
Chapter Thirty-Three - Flickering White Light
Chapter Thirty-Four - Breathe!
Epilogue
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Alanna Nash
Copyright
About the Publisher
INTRODUCTION
No matter if he were young and thin, a vision in gold lamé, or middle-aged and paunchy, stretching the physical limits of his gabardine jumpsuit, Elvis Presley never failed to affect his female audiences the same way: He drove them crazy. The mere sight and sound of him made women around the world drop all inhibitions, and to publicly behave as they never would otherwise, giving in to screams, fainting, and wild exhibitions of frenzy.
Sometime during the 1970s, when Elvis was a Las Vegas staple, Jean Beaulne, who had started his entertainment career in the 1960s as one-third of Les Baronets, Montreal’s answer to the Beatles, was flabbergasted to see the reaction of one woman who attended Elvis’s dinner show at the Las Vegas Hilton.
In between songs, some twenty-five minutes into the performance, as Elvis shook hands and kissed the women who crowded up near the stage and hoped to receive one of the multitude of scarves he ceremoniously dispensed, “We heard a woman yelling in the back of the room, and then we turned to see her hopping from one tabletop to the other to get up to Elvis.
“He was so surprised! He made a face, like, ‘Wow, what happened?’ Everybody in the room was laughing. Then she put her arms around his neck and kissed him. He smiled and gave her a scarf, and then she turned around and did the same thing, jumping from one table to the other. Everybody started to applaud.”
Yet Elvis was never more potent than at the beginning of his career, before the patently routine scarf offering, when he was dangerous, revolutionary, and nobody knew what to expect.
On November 23, 1956, two days after the nationwide release of Love Me Tender, Elvis’s first film, a high school photographer named Lew Allen covered a Presley concert in Cleveland and was astonished at what he saw.
“There was a row of policemen standing in front of the stage, and girls would start at the back of the auditorium with their eyes on Elvis, and run as fast as they could [toward the stage]. They’d bounce off these policemen’s stomachs, and then bounce back four or five feet and land on their rear ends. And they would still have their eyes on Elvis. It was amazing. They