Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [113]
He talked to Gladys about her all the time, going on and on, and she could see he was overwhelmed with her, calling her “Debbie” with a smile in his voice. When a reporter asked if he had a favorite female star, he said, “I love ’em all, but I’ve got one special gal—and she’s the only gal for me. But she keeps me 64,000 miles away!” And who was that? “Debbie!” Elvis blurted.
But there was a larger problem, aside from the fact that Elvis had already publicly declared that he had two girlfriends, Barbara Hearn and June Juanico. Debra’s brassy mother, who managed her daughter’s career and had been in the theater—some said burlesque, inspiring Debra’s routine on The Milton Berle Show—wanted her to have nothing to do with him. Elvis couldn’t figure it out. His conversations with Debra, both on the set and at her house in Beverly Hills, where he sometimes played with the pet chimpanzee (he’d later get one himself), revolved largely around the topic of God. Yet her father, likewise, found Elvis not up to Debra’s standards.
“There were stories going around about him,” the actress told Suzanne Finstad, and her mother, fearing the worst, would not let Debra leave the house unchaperoned. Try as he might, Elvis could not convince Debra’s parents that he was not the hell-raising hooligan that some of the press made him out to be. As with so many of Elvis’s younger love interests, Debra had never been on an actual date, which made her even that more irresistible to him. But because of her parents’ virulent reaction, Debra dared not let Elvis know for certain that she returned his affections. “I was very shy then,” she continued to Finstad. “I hardly talked . . . I’m not sure I ever told him how I felt, but he could feel it.”
Elvis could, indeed, feel it, but he didn’t know what to think: Talk had it that Debra was seeing Howard Hughes at the same time, and from the cars that came and went at Debra’s house, Elvis believed it was true.
A week after the disastrous episode with Natalie Wood at the Beverly Wilshire, Nick Adams took Elvis out to a hotel in Malibu, where Natalie was enjoying a getaway with her bisexual boyfriend, actor Scott Marlowe. Natalie and Scott had spent the time talking, as they had before, about marrying. But both Warner Brothers, where Natalie was under contract, and her mother, Maria, strictly opposed the idea and forced them to break up. Now Elvis, Natalie, and Nick, also rumored to be bisexual, were “almost a threesome, having a lot of fun together,” Natalie told newspaper columnist Louella Parsons. They were seen that week at the Iris in Hollywood, watching the trashy B movies Hot Rod Girls and Girls in Prison.
Tab Hunter remembers how taken she was with him. “Natalie and I were in New York doing The Perry Como Show, and we were walking back to her hotel. She was staying at the Essex House, and . . . she was going on and on about Elvis, and I was getting a little annoyed and a little jealous here.
“The hotel sign spelled out E-S-S-E-X H-O-U-S-E all over Broadway, but the lights were out of the first two letters, making it read S-E-X H-O-U-S-E.
“I said, ‘Don’t tell me he’s going to come and visit you at the SEX HOUSE!’ And she took her purse and went wham!, and just hauled off and belted me. Natalie was crazy about him.”
But deep down, Natalie also found Elvis desperately lonely, a lot like herself, even as so much about him mystified her. He acted more like a concerned older brother around her than anything else, and as she told Presley biographer Albert Goldman, he was a little too conventional, almost square.
“He was the first person of my age group I had ever met who said to me, ‘How come you’re wearing makeup? Why do you want to go to New York? Why do you want to be on your own? Why don’t you want to stay home and be a sweet little girl? It’s nice to stay home.’ We’d go to P.C. Brown’s and have a hot fudge sundae. We’d go to Hamburger Hamlet and have a burger and a Coke. He didn’t drink. He