Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [137]
“He liked to do the bumps and grinds as I did them, and that was basically what he used in his routine from then on.” Indeed, his 1957 concerts in support of the release of Jailhouse Rock—particularly his benefit show for the Elvis Presley Youth Center in Tupelo that fall—would be his most sexually blatant.
He’d called her a time or two in 1956, and she claims to have visited him when they were playing the same cities in the South. Now she became a sexual mentor for him as well—he might have been with a lot of girls, but he really had no technique as a lover.
In some ways, their sex was clinical, and she sized him up in much the same way. (“He was not badly built. He wasn’t humongous, but he wasn’t tiny either. I would say that he was a little bit above average.”) He was always a considerate partner, always made sure she was satisfied. But in her experience, he kissed like a high school boy (“I told him most women don’t like to get their face that wet”), and he was timid in the art of cunnilingus.
“He loved oral sex for himself. He wasn’t very aggressive for the female, but he would try it if I wanted. I always cleaned him before and after, took him in the shower, or I would bring a nice scented washcloth with perfumed soap and wash him off and towel-dry him, because I didn’t want anybody else’s residue. He once told me that I was one of the cleanest women he had ever been with.”
After years of separating sex and love, having good girls at home and “whores,” as he said, on the road, Elvis now tried to combine the two. But he knew that Gladys would never really approve of her, and Tura knew he couldn’t be monogamous. (“You are only human and you are a man, and that thing rules everything guys do.”) She also believed that he couldn’t refuse women, that as a southern gentleman, he literally didn’t want to be discourteous to their advances. “He wanted to please, and he didn’t know how to be standoffish with women, because that was not how he was raised. He always treated all women like ladies.”
But he seldom used protection when they made love, remembering the trauma of the early incident in Shreveport, and relied on early withdrawal as his form of birth control. Tura told him that had to stop.
“I said, ‘If you are going to be with other girls, make sure you are well protected, because somebody is going to try to say that she’s gotten pregnant by you, and if you are not careful, she’ll make you marry her or ruin your career.” His mother had told him the same thing, he said. He’d be careful.
The relationship, which was slight at best, lasted until he went into the army. But though the romance faded, the friendship remained. Sonny West, Red’s cousin, who would later join the entourage, remembers meeting her in the early 1960s. Mostly, Elvis would call Tura for advice with various women. “After we split and I was no longer his girlfriend,” she says, “I became his adopted mama.”
Yet his fixation on burlesque stars—his female equivalent—continued. In October 1957, he went to Las Vegas for a ten-day vacation, staying at the Sahara Hotel. There he had a one-night stand with legendary exotic dancer Tempest Storm, eight years his senior. She later recounted it in a television interview.
“He called me about three one morning. He wanted to come over. I told him to come in the back door, that I didn’t want the doorman seeing who I was entertaining. He crawled across a back fence, and in doing so, ripped his pants.”
Storm excused herself to put on one of her sexiest negligees, and to lock her French poodle in another room. The pooch would become a problem.
“All night, as Elvis and I were together, my little poodle barked and scratched at the door.”
The last time she saw Elvis was about 1970. The first thing he asked her was, “Do you still have that damned little poodle?”
Elvis appeared to everyone to be on top of the world—thriving record career, movies, women, and now a mansion for himself and his family. But underneath, the stress was getting to him. That March, in downtown Memphis, he was accused of pulling