Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [136]
They were lonely, without much to say to each other, or even to Minnie Mae. And so not long after they moved in, Vernon invited his father, Jessie, and his wife, Vera, to come stay for a while, to drive down from Louisville in the new Ford Fairlane Elvis had bought them.
The visit was awkward for Vera, with Minnie Mae in the house, but they all adjusted. Jessie was “kind of overwhelmed at all of it,” remembered Vera’s granddaughter, Iris Sermon Leftwich. They weren’t used to a king-size bed, and that night, Vera sat on one side and Jessie on the other. He looked around the room and then back at his wife. “How’s the weather over there?” he said.
On March 27, 1957, Elvis left Memphis for Chicago with his cousin Gene (now Elvis’s man Friday), Arthur Hooton, and George Klein, who was making his first trip with the group. Before starting Jailhouse Rock, he would do a brief tour of several U.S. cities with a quick swing into Canada.
In a much publicized event, replete with press conference, Elvis would play the International Amphitheater the following night, debuting a $2,500 gold-leaf tuxedo made for him by Nudie Cohen, the Russian-American tailor. Nudie was famous for elaborate and inventive stage costumes—it was Cohen who designed Hank Williams’s famous white cowboy suit with musical notes on the sleeves—though he started out customizing underwear for showgirls and strippers at his first store, Nudie’s for the Ladies, in New York City.
Elvis had a particular stripper on his mind during his two days in Chicago, as he’d spotted an advertisement for Tura Satana’s show at the Follies Theatre. He was still as fascinated by exotic dancers as he had been in 1955 when he and Tura first met in Biloxi. His interest in them grew stronger during his trips to Las Vegas, and then again when he read the script for Jailhouse Rock.
Now in Chicago, Elvis went to see Tura’s afternoon performance, going by himself, wearing dark glasses and a hat. He watched her routine and then asked to go backstage. She hadn’t expected him, so she hadn’t made arrangements, and “the girls from the show were just fawning and climbing all over him.” Tura took him into her dressing room, but people wouldn’t leave them alone, so they went to a restaurant down the street at State and Van Buren. The owner sat them in a booth in the back where nobody would see them, and they planned to meet again late that night at the theater. “That’s when we really started really dating.”
Just as he had with seventeen-year-old Kay Wheeler, Elvis asked Tura to show him her dance steps. She explained that a lot of her performance was based on martial arts, particularly the flips and splits, and the knee slides and backbends.
“What do you mean, martial arts?” he asked.
“Well, my dad showed me how to protect myself after the rape. I incorporated a lot of it in my routine by just adding it to music.”
“Oh,” he said. “You’ve got to teach me how to do that!”
She took him through it and then showed him how to do the shimmy with one leg, both legs, and then switch over. He laughed. It felt good.
“Can you teach me how to twirl the tassels?”
“Yes, but I can only teach you how to twirl one.”
He laughed again, thinking about where she might mean to put it.
“What if I want to learn to twirl two?”
“Sorry, honey. You really don’t have enough up there to do that.”
“Okay, how do you do the knee slides?”
“Carefully.”
He saw what she meant, and then she showed him how to do the slide and the splits at the same time. He’d been dropping to his knees onstage already for about a year, though he wouldn’t be able to do it in the gold suit, because the gold was already flaking off. But he wanted something a little more dramatic. The first time he tried the slides, he picked up a splinter, so he didn’t do it again. He said, “That one hurt!”
Finally, he told her he wanted to learn the bump and grind—the big pelvic thrusts, and the real hip swivel, not just the teases that he’d been doing since The Milton Berle Show. Tura showed him some subtle movements, and he pushed