Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [132]
“I was at a party,” remembered Carmen, a notorious bombshell. “I had this Indian costume on and not much else, just a little thing going between the legs, and no bra. Elvis walked in and went, ‘Uh, hello.’ The photographer started shooting us and all of a sudden, his manager came along and pulled him away.”
Elvis intended to see the busty blond anyway. She excited him on several levels—she was a former consort of mobster Johnny Roselli, and a pal of both Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe, whom she favored. Though she was five years his senior, he invited her over to the hotel. “The first day I went to meet him, I was sitting in a chair, and he was sitting in another chair opposite me, playing the guitar. All of a sudden he strummed and said, ‘Are you wearing any panties?’ That was his favorite thing to ask any girl. And, of course, I wasn’t.”
Jeanne, an Arkansas girl who grew up picking cotton in Paragould, related to Elvis’s simple tastes in food, and she had him to her place for dinner on occasion. “I cooked southern-fried chicken for him, just like his mother. He brought me a present one night, and I thought, ‘Oh, he’s going to give me an outfit.’ I opened it up and it turned out to be a little French apron. I put it on with nothing else, and everything was going great until I bent over to look to see if the chicken was done. Obviously, it burned that night.”
Elvis had his mother very much on his mind during the filming of Loving You, as at the end of January 1957, she was admitted to Baptist Hospital for tests. She stayed nearly two weeks, as doctors probed to find the cause of the abnormally dark circles around her eyes. They checked her liver, too, suspecting cirrhosis or hepatitis, since she admitted that she drank and used pills. But if the tests were conclusive, no one talked about them at the time.
Barbara Hearn spent two days with her in the hospital. “She did not look seriously ill, and silly as it seems, we had a very good time. I created some crazy hairdos for her, and filed and polished her nails, and we had something like a girl party in her room. For some reason I was the only one with her for hours and hours each day.”
Her hospitalization delayed the Presleys’ trip to Hollywood, but four days after her release, Gladys and Vernon, accompanied by their friends Willy and Carl Nichols (Carl was the contractor working on the house), took a night train for Los Angeles. Elvis gave them a tour of Beverly Hills and drove them past Debra Paget’s house as an excuse to try to see her.
When they visited the set, they appeared as extras in the scene in which Elvis sings “Loving You” and “Got a Lot o’ Livin’ to Do” in front of an audience. Elvis’s parents can be plainly seen sitting on the aisle, Gladys, still as full of rhythm as she’d been in her youth, clapping gaily to the beat. After her death, Elvis would never be able to watch the film again.
Lizabeth Scott met the Presleys on the set, and she was struck by Elvis and Gladys’s passionate bond. “It was so obvious. You could not just see it, but feel it. Their synergy was nonverbal, but that tenderness went to full bloom when they looked at each other.”
Shortly after they returned to Memphis, Gladys and Vernon went searching for a new house, someplace bigger and more secluded. Their Audubon Drive neighbors, many of them society people, old money southerners, considered the family an embarrassment and had worried them to death about the hordes of noisy fans who gathered at all hours and trampled the lawns. Elvis, hoping to make amends, accepted an invitation for cocktails from Frank and Betty Pidgeon, who lived up the street. Frank had underwritten the insurance on the house, and the uncommonly beautiful Betty—a mix of southern belle and femme fatale—was the daughter of E. H. “Boss” Crump, who ran the town from his election as mayor in 1910 until he died in 1954.
At the last minute, Elvis, feeling awkward among the country club set, tried to back out. But Gladys insisted he go, and so he took Cliff with him and