Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [129]
In Elvis’s view, the black hair was only one of several cosmetic improvements necessary to transform him to movie star perfection. He’d already had his teeth capped. But he’d always felt the bridge of his nose was too broad—with his darker skin tone, he thought it sometimes made him look Negroid—and he wanted a more refined profile. Some time between Love Me Tender and Loving You, he went to Hollywood’s Dr. Maury Parks, a favorite among the film elite, to streamline his nose, sand away his acne, and tighten the skin around his jawline.
Elvis would return to Dr. Parks in years to come. But at first he was skittish about any such procedure, and so he took George Klein with him, footing the bill for George’s nose bob. Elvis had always liked Barbara Hearn’s nose, so he brought along his favorite portrait of her and presented it to Dr. Parks as a model for George’s new look. After the procedure, Elvis referred to George’s proboscis as “Barbara’s nose.”
He might as well have used the Loving You ingenue, Dolores Hart, as an ideal, for the seventeen-year-old actress was the picture of fresh-faced innocence.
Born in Chicago as Dolores Hicks, she spent her early years in Los Angeles. Her father, Bert, was an actor, doing bit parts in films. And her uncle was the opera legend Mario Lanza, one of Elvis’s favorite singers.
Hart’s parents divorced when she was small, but to escape their bickering, the child wrote a letter to her grandparents in the Windy City, asking if she might live with them. She arrived on the train, alone, with a ticket pinned to her coat. “From the age of seven, I never wanted to be anything but an actress,” she says, in part to assuage her sudden mood swings: “I’m positive I’m somewhat manic-depressive by nature. I don’t think there’s anyone any happier than I am when I’m happy, or can take a nosedive quicker in the face of tragedy. I made a career of looking like an obvious neutral, rather than parading my feelings of being in the depths or at the heights.”
She learned her craft in one of Chicago’s elegant movie palaces, where her grandfather worked as a projectionist. The child often went with him to work, awakening him from naps every twelve minutes so he could change the reels.
Loving You, in which Hart plays Elvis’s young love interest, was her first film. She won her contract after her remarkable lead performance in a Loyola Marymount University production of Joan of Lorraine led to an interview at Paramount. She arrived in her school sweater and bobby socks, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail.
Within two weeks, she was on the set, but as a scholarship student who hit the books hard, she hadn’t kept up with popular music and had no idea who Elvis was, really. He was just a “charming, simple young boy with longer sideburns than most.” But he had impeccable manners. When they were introduced, “He couldn’t have been more gracious. He jumped to his feet and said, ‘Good afternoon, Miss Dolores.’ ”
Elvis found her the quintessential shy virgin—she was such a delicate girl, so untouched by worldly experience as to seem almost unreal. But it was obvious that she lived her religion, and as a devout Catholic, she insisted her favorite childhood memory was of her baptism at age ten. With Elvis, she made it clear right off the bat that she would not entertain the idea of mixing work with romance, because she didn’t think it appropriate.
Still, something in her responded to the primal beat of his music, and she found him both magnetic and thrilling. When he performed the musical numbers on the set, “I couldn’t take myself away from him. Even if I wasn’t in the scene, I still went to hear him sing, because he was just riveting. You were just dragged away—your soul just took you. He was so dynamic.”
When they kissed for the cameras, they both felt a connection. Dolores blushed way back to her neck, and “my ears started getting purple,” and even Elvis’s ears turned red. Director Kanter called, “Cut,