Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [128]
“We’d tickle, fight, laugh, mess around, but all you’d have to say is, ‘Stop!,’ and he’d roll over and quit. It would never be mentioned again that night. But next time, it would be the same thing exactly. You’d fight with him, kid around and scuffle. The next thing, he’d get serious and you’d just push him away. I think that if he really pushed, I would have done it.”
No matter how Elvis defined his philosophy of rearing young girls, the relationship contained a strong erotic element and was reminiscent of the days when he invited several girls into his room at once on the Hayride. Now Elvis and the girls would sit on the bed yoga style, with Elvis in the middle, and he’d kiss each one. “Gloria is jealous ’cause I kissed Frances,” he’d say, and then turn it around: “Frances is jealous ’cause I kissed Heidi.” Eventually, they’d tire of it all, and Elvis would turn out the light, lying with an arm around two of them, with the third girl stretched out across his feet.
“Elvis was always kissing,” says Frances, “and it was a good kiss, a real good one. He might be doing anything—playing pool, anything—he’d walk up and kiss you, or he might turn his cheek for you to kiss him. He did that in the car a lot. He was especially romantic when it was just you and him. He might talk to you about things that bothered him, and just like teenagers, you’d neck a little bit. Elvis was like a teenager somewhat—the things we did were things that kids do. They really were all very innocent. A lot of people didn’t think so, but it was a different day and time.”
Heidi, Gloria, and Frances were always the last fans to leave Audubon Drive. At three or four in the morning, Elvis would sit up and kiss each girl and say, “I love you, and I’ll see you tomorrow.” Lamar would drive them home, and they’d catch a few hours of sleep before getting up and going to junior high. “The amazing thing is that I never had one problem with any of the parents. Not ever. It was something I assumed would not happen, and it didn’t.”
Elvis didn’t want his mother to know they’d stayed so late, and before Gladys got up, they were out and gone. But chances are she was well aware that they were there, and that she probably wouldn’t have minded, given her approval of Jackie Rowland. She knew that Elvis, a boy-man, was looking for a child-woman he could mold into his idea of a perfect mate. Fourteen-year-olds were just the right age, as they allowed him to play the role of the older man who would teach them about life. If he could find one who had his mother’s coloring, who shared her values, and who also somehow felt like his twin soul, she would hold him captive.
His friendship with the trio lasted through the early 1960s, about the time he met fourteen-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu.
On January 14, 1957, Elvis reported to Paramount Studios in Los Angeles, where makeup supervisor Wally Westmore fulfilled one of the star’s lifelong dreams—to have his hair professionally dyed black. (The exact shade was “mink brown,” so dark brown as to appear black on camera.) Aside from his stint in the army, when he was forced to revert to his natural hair color, never again would he completely change it back. Though he’d inherited his hair color from his father, now he looked more like Gladys. It bolstered their bond, their oneness.
Finally, Elvis also looked like Tony Curtis, whose work he still studied. He met his early idol one day on the Paramount lot. Curtis still remembers it.
“On lunch hour, I’d go for a walk. One day, I went by this big camper, and the door opened, and there was Elvis. He reached down and took my arm and said, ‘Mr. Curtis, won’t you please come in for a minute? I’ve been a fan of yours ever since I was a kid. I want you to meet my buddies.’ He introduced me to them one by one, and he said, ‘What a joy, what an experience, Mr. Curtis, to finally meet you!’ I said, ‘Excuse me, please, don’t call me Mr. Curtis. Call me Tony.’ He said,