Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [106]
Though Marguerite was a good chaperone, Elvis and Jackie had other moments where “he and I got off together and had some time to share with one another.”
One such event occurred backstage at the Florida Theatre. Elvis and Jackie sat in a pair of chairs and talked while Elvis’s scary cousin, Junior, perched on the stairs nearby. Suddenly, everyone noticed that the strap on Jackie’s sundress had slipped down and fallen off her shoulder. “Junior made a smart remark, something to the effect of, ‘Yeah, baby, take it all off!’ Elvis jumped up out of that chair, grabbed him, shook him, and said, ‘Don’t you dare talk to her like that! She’s my girlfriend and she’s a lady!’ ”
Predictably, they never had sex (“We kissed and hugged, but he never touched me inappropriately”), and chances are they wouldn’t have, even if Jackie had been willing. Elvis wasn’t having intercourse with June, either.
Already, Elvis’s reputation as a sex symbol was becoming a burden. In the 1960s, he would tell Larry Geller, his spiritual adviser and a member of his entourage, that in the early days of his fame, he had relations with so many women that he was hospitalized for exhaustion. Whether that was the reason behind his 1955 hospital visit in Jacksonville isn’t known. But according to Geller, the incident taught Elvis that he should not live his life as a sex machine, and that sex without love meant nothing, even though he could not always control himself.
Elvis’s label as a sex god, then, hampered him psychologically. Women assumed, from his image and his movements onstage, that he was a lover of legendary proportions. But he was insecure about his sexual prowess, and felt inadequate once his lovemaking moved beyond dry humping and other adolescent practices. And since he was brought up to please, and pleasing is part of any entertainer’s personality, he feared that he might not measure up to a woman’s expectations in bed. His apprehension was so incapacitating that it often made him withdraw from actual intercourse and extend his foreplay instead.
This was also a factor in his gravitation toward thirteen- and fourteen-year-old girls. At that level of sexual development, young teens of his generation were likely to still be innocents, satisfied to simply make out and abstain from intercourse—precisely where Elvis felt most at ease. He wanted virgins—he called them “cherries”—so that he might mold them sexually, but also so they wouldn’t have anyone to compare him to as a lover. That way, they would be less likely to critique or pass judgment on his performance.
But Elvis failed to realize the damage that sexual flirtation could have on young girls, especially coming from someone so famous and charismatic. Though Jackie went on to marry, “Once you’d kissed Elvis, it was all downhill after that. . . . I guess you could say the flame still sizzles.” Her sentiment is common among women who enjoyed any involvement with Elvis, particularly if he was the first male with whom they were involved, and the divorce rate among them is high. Jackie herself divorced after nearly forty-two years of marriage.
One of the ironies of her story is that Jackie and Eunice Gooding, Judge Gooding’s wife, became good friends. While Jackie could see both sides of the issue, Elvis never did. After his last performance at the Florida Theatre on August 11, according to June Juanico, Elvis had a message for the judge and his cronies in attendance. “You know how Elvis always said, ‘Thank you very much’? I heard it just as clear as day. He said, ‘Fuck you very much. Fuck you very much.’ Everybody was screaming, but all the members of his entourage heard it. He did it twice and he looked over at me and grinned.” Once they were together in the room, June asked him if she’d heard him correctly. “You heard correctly,” he said.
The tour wound up the next day in New Orleans on August 12. In the Big Easy, where almost anything went, Elvis gave his performance