Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [130]
In an intriguing bit of casting, veteran actress Lizabeth Scott played something akin to a female version of Colonel Parker, except that as Deke’s publicist/manager, her feelings for him bounced from maternal to vaguely erotic. Their brief romantic scenes carried a kind of androgynous magnetism—he too innocent and pretty, she too strong and dominant—even as they also telegraphed something taboo for the late 1950s. Today they remain compulsively watchable.
Scott, born Emma Matzo in Scranton, Pennsylvania, was a pointed-bra blond whose Slovakian features spoke of an underlying cruelty. Like Lauren Bacall before her, she exuded a delicious sensuality that managed to be both icy and fiery hot. Off set, she was as captivated with Elvis as Dolores Hart, but for a different reason. “I’ve always thought that his eyes had been underplayed, and his pelvis has been overplayed. The shadows around his eyes fascinated me, and I can’t tell you why. They were powerful, piercing, playful, and sexy, but I wasn’t aroused sexually. I just saw all these things in his eyes.”
Elvis was fairly certain that he hadn’t aroused her, because two years earlier, Confidential magazine had outed her as a lesbian with a very busy little black book. The husky-voiced Scott, who never married, sued the publication, but it was an enormous scandal, and the public viewed her as a deviant. Hal Wallis, who had signed her in 1945 at age twenty-two, kept her on the back burner for a while, but after Loving You, she disappeared from pictures for fifteen years, resurfacing in 1972 with the quirky British film Pulp. Around that time, she spoke of her retirement, saying she’d never thought of it as such. “I simply decided there was more to life than just making films. The most important thing to me is my personal life.”
Lizabeth tried to bond with Elvis, believing he was extremely intelligent, with a photographic memory, perhaps. But alas, “You couldn’t have an intimate conversation with him because of his entourage.” And so she tried a different tack. Seeing that the guys played with water guns on the set, Lizabeth joined in. “If anything, I had fun with him and his boyfriends, because I had a water pistol, too! So we water pistoled each other rather than verbalize.”
Yet Elvis was somewhat scared of her, as it was the first time he had knowingly been around such an exotic woman. The notion of her sexuality both titillated and confused him (he pronounced her “unholy”), especially since Junior teased him unmercifully. “Are you gonna take her to bed tonight, Elvis?” Junior taunted, Cliff and Gene joining in raucous glee. “Don’t worry,” Elvis shot back nervously, trying to hide his discomfort. And he did invite her up to his suite at the Beverly Wilshire. But Lizabeth wanted no part of it. She was a sophisticated, smart lady, and she knew the guys had put him up to it.
“They weren’t of the same mettle that he was. He was just an entity unto himself. It was like the halo just went all around him. What can you say? That was Elvis.”
Deke’s mascaraed eyelashes lent Elvis’s character an air of gay desire, but no stories of homosexual dalliance or acting out ever surfaced about Elvis himself. In Hollywood, he invariably worked with actors, stagehands, and dancers who were gay, and when he had to be carried or lifted up overhead, occasionally one of them groped him. He didn’t particularly like it, but it didn’t spark his temper, either. Mostly, he chuckled.
Still, Byron Raphael, the Colonel’s young emissary in 1956 and 1957, remembered that when Elvis first went to Hollywood, he was totally unprepared for his visit with rock-and-roll queen Little Richard, whose songs (“Tutti Frutti”) Elvis had performed for several years.
A fellow southerner (born in Macon, Georgia, as Richard Wayne Penniman), Little Richard invited Elvis to his house after hearing that he had referred to him as “a friend of mine . . . [but] I never met him” onstage in the