Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [110]
Since the performance came smack in the middle of filming Love Me Tender, Elvis was allowed to appear live from the CBS Studios in Los Angeles. More than 80 percent of the national audience watched him sing “Love Me Tender,” “Ready Teddy,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” and two verses of “Hound Dog.”
Among them was eleven-year-old Priscilla Ann Beaulieu, of Austin, Texas, whose stepfather, Paul, a career Air Force officer, had bought her Elvis’s debut album at the PX. “I thought it might be something [she] would like . . . it seemed like music for her generation.” But once he and his wife, Ann, heard the music, they didn’t have such a high opinion. “Frankly, we forbade her to watch the show,” he remembers. But forbidden fruit is that much sweeter, Priscilla would later say. “I cracked open my door just enough to see the television set.”
So many extraordinary things were happening for Elvis that he sometimes seemed oblivious to his old way of life. He was having a blast, being a movie star, meeting beautiful women, staying up all hours, and doing and saying whatever he wanted. Nothing inhibited him, or if it did, he didn’t act like it. In fact, fame emboldened him. He could be both playful and arrogant and get away with it, even with steely female reporters. Or at least he thought he could. When a young New York journalist came to visit him during the filming, he flirted with her shamelessly.
“A press agent came by to tell me I had had enough time with Elvis,” she wrote. “I started to leave and Elvis, who was still sprawled on the couch, darted out his hand and caught my foot. ‘Maybe she’s shy; maybe she’d like to be alone with me,’ he said. The press agent shrugged and left.
“I asked Elvis to take his hand off my foot. ‘Okay,’ he said, looking up under heavy lids. ‘Ah’m just spoofing you.’ I asked Elvis how he felt about girls who threw themselves at him. Again the heavy-lidded look. ‘Ah usually take them,’ he said, watching my face for the shock value of his words. He grinned. ‘Hell,’ he said, ‘you know, Ah’m kind of having fun with you because you’re so smart.’ ”
Colonel Parker had used William Morris to broker Elvis’s movie deals, building on his relationship with Abe Lastfogel, the diminutive head of the respected talent agency, from his Eddy Arnold days. Lastfogel had assigned Leonard Hirshan directly to Elvis, since as Hirshan puts it, “The three of us negotiated the [Love Me Tender] deal with Fox, so I considered that my deal as well as anybody’s.” But though Elvis was Morris’s client, and not Parker, the Colonel never let the agency deal directly with his star, insisting that everything go through him. Parker particularly didn’t trust Hirshan, fearing that he would make himself too powerful with Elvis and get in the Colonel’s way. Parker all but banned Hirshan from Presley’s movie sets and then went about finding a mole within the agency to report on their plans.
Byron Raphael was a twenty-two-year-old agent-in-training at the Morris Agency in Beverly Hills in 1956, working his way up in the mailroom. One day, he delivered an envelope to Elvis’s outsized manager on the Fox lot. The Colonel sized up the small, affable young man and immediately appropriated him (“Tell your bosses you’re going to work for me”), and made Raphael his spy—both within the Morris office and inside Elvis’s camp. Since Raphael was only a year older than Elvis, and obsessed with music, it was an easy alliance.
On September 10, midway through the shooting, Nick Adams—also believed to be a sentry for the Colonel, reporting on Elvis’s comings and goings—arranged