Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [125]
She thought a gold lamé vest would be an appropriate Christmas gift, and she knew that he could wear it onstage. So she went down to the seconds department at Goldsmith’s, where they sold remnants of material, and she bought the gold lamé and three gold initials and some black taffeta for the lining, and asked her girlfriend’s mother to make it for her. She wasn’t sure what to get Gladys and Vernon, but she finally settled on a large, ornate gold Bible with color illustrations. It was out of her price range, really, but she’d splurged because Elvis had had such a remarkable year, and it was truly a Christmas to celebrate.
June Juanico had been thinking about Christmas, too, though she hadn’t actually seen Elvis since her strained visit in October. It was getting late in the year now, and neither of them had said anything about whether they would spend the holiday in Memphis or Biloxi, but surely he would call about it any day now, because they were practically engaged, even though she’d never accepted that ring he’d tried to give her. The only thing that worried her was that he was so jealous of all of her friends, wanting to “keep me right next to him, with his arm around me and show people that I belonged to him, and all this kind of crap.” It had a smothering effect.
But on Christmas Day, neither Barbara nor June sat at Gladys’s holiday table. For the most glorious day of his most magnificent year, Elvis chose Dottie Harmony to be at his side. He hadn’t even known her two months.
When June found out, she hit the ceiling. Elvis tried to calm her. “It was the Colonel’s idea, baby! Honest! For the publicity. He said it was good for my career!”
She knew that Parker did want him linked with actresses and dancers, and Elvis did like legs that went on for days. “But you don’t invite a showgirl to spend Christmas at your house!” That was it for her. “If he cared for me, how could he expect me to swallow all these other women in his life? I was going to be his one and only, or I wasn’t going to be anything.” And now Elvis was saying he couldn’t get married, not even after three years. He wouldn’t dare do that to the Colonel. He had too much invested in him.
June felt something break inside of her.
And now Barbara would, too. She just kept saying it over and over: Dottie Harmony. A chorus girl. And for Christmas. That was a time for family and special friends, not a newly acquired Las Vegas showgirl.
“If it had been Elizabeth Taylor or somebody, I wouldn’t have minded. But this really hurt me.”
And there was more hurt around the bend. When Barbara gave Elvis his gold lamé vest, he handed her an unexpected gift: a Sunbeam shaver. Her heart landed with such a thud that for a moment it knocked the breath out of her. She had gone to so much trouble with the vest, and she’d had to put his parents’ gift in layaway, since she didn’t have the money to buy it all at once.
“It was a pretty shaver, with rhinestones on the little stand and a quilted cover. But it was still a shaver, and certainly not the kind of thing he would have ordinarily gotten for me. It felt like he realized a day or two before Christmas, ‘Oh, my goodness, I haven’t gotten anything for Barbara,’ and threw a few dollars at someone who went out and got it. I didn’t need it or want it, and I never used it. I truly believe I had rather gotten nothing than that shaver. I still have the miserable thing, but it was an embarrassment then and is still.”
Elvis couldn’t win for losing. All his women were either mad at him or breaking off their relationship. Nothing seemed to work. Just nothing. That Christmas,