Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [126]
He was so glad to see her, and no, he hadn’t heard she’d gotten married last year. But wow, she looked great, and he hoped she was happy. He’d made a few records since he last saw her. Would she like to have some? He had them in the car.
“Gee, Elvis,” she said. “Thanks, but no thanks. I don’t have a record player.”
Dolores Hart (left), Elvis, and Lizabeth Scott enjoy a friendly game at Scott’s home in Hollywood at the completion of Loving You. “If there were one thing that I am most grateful for,” says Hart, now a Benedictine nun, “it’s the privilege of being one of the few persons left to acknowledge his innocence.” (Courtesy of David Troedson/Elvis Australia)
Chapter Twelve
Twin Surprises
At the start of 1957, Elvis found himself in a constant grip of anxiety. The Colonel had lined up a plethora of creative and career opportunities for him—a third Ed Sullivan Show appearance, and two movies scheduled just for that year alone—but Elvis’s personal life lay in shards.
June would barely take his calls, Dottie considered her visit to be a disaster (Elvis was late coming to get her, girls held up banners at the airport that said GO HOME, DOTTIE HARMONY, and the Presleys read this big gold Bible every single night), and Barbara was upset about . . . well, maybe a lot of things. She obviously hadn’t liked her shaver, but then that’s what Dottie got her, going down the list of “female gifts” that Gladys gave them when they went shopping.
Elvis had never meant the gift to be cold. In fact, he had extended himself for her with Hal Kanter on Audubon Drive. Knowing that Barbara had an interest in acting, and building on the conceit that the film was essentially his own story, Elvis had asked the director if Barbara might play his girlfriend. He wanted them to meet, he told Hal, and thought she would be good in the part.
But Kanter thought otherwise, telling Elvis she was lovely to look at but horrible to hear. “He said I had the worst voice he had ever heard,” Barbara reports. “I just assumed the Colonel, who was very rude to me, did not want me around, that the thought of me working with his boy every day curdled his blood. But it was very sweet and naïve of Elvis to see if it could be done.”
To make it up to her, Elvis would wear Barbara’s gold lamé vest with one of Natalie’s shirts on The Ed Sullivan Show on January 6. He hadn’t prepared her for it, so it was a wonderful surprise.
“I said, ‘There he is on Ed Sullivan, coast-to-coast television, and he’s got on my little five-dollar vest.’ I just loved it.”
At the network’s request, Elvis sang a gospel number, “Peace in the Valley,” along with a version of “Don’t Be Cruel” that was heavily influenced by rhythm-and-blues great Jackie Wilson, whose live show Elvis watched obsessively in Las Vegas. On the latter, the cameras cropped Elvis from the waist up—a brilliant tactical move on the part of the Colonel and Hank Saperstein, Elvis’s merchandising king, to capitalize on his image as a sexual terror.
At the end of the program, watched by fifty-four million Americans, the stone-faced Sullivan took time to deliver a character reference: “This is a real decent, fine boy . . . We want to say that we’ve never had a pleasanter experience with a big name than we’ve had with you.”
Elvis knew he was the luckiest guy in the world. But he couldn’t really enjoy most of the good things that were happening, because there was so much weighing on him now. On January 4, he’d taken his preinduction physical to determine his draft status, and four days later, on his twenty-second birthday, the Memphis Draft Board announced his classification—1A.
As the Colonel explained it to him, it meant he’d probably be drafted within the next eight months. What Elvis didn’t know was that his imminent service was precisely what the wily manager wanted,