Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [138]
The following month, on April 19, Elvis imported another Hollywood starlet to Memphis, this time for Easter weekend. Her name was Yvonne Lime. A California native, the wholesome blond had an uncredited role in Loving You, but a costarring role as Michael Landon’s girlfriend in I Was a Teenage Werewolf.
Elvis had seen her in The Rainmaker. Since he’d read portions of the script for his screen test, he studied the picture intently on its release. When Yvonne came on the Loving You set, playing a small part in which she talked to a group of teenagers, he stayed to watch her do her scene. It made her nervous, but not as much as when he came over afterward and asked for her phone number. The next day, he introduced her to his parents, who were still visiting, and to his friend Judy Spreckels. Then after he came home to Memphis, he started calling her, saying, “Honey, I miss you so much. Please leave Hollywood and come.”
They stopped first on Audubon Drive (where Yvonne’s picture now replaced Kay Wheeler’s in his bedroom), and then he gave her a quick tour of town on his motorcycle. At the end, he rode her out to Graceland, which was still being renovated. They posed for a newspaper photographer, Bob Williams, in front of the stately columns, but Yvonne had on a striped outfit that looked more like California lounge pajamas than Tennessee street wear, so the pictures telegraphed publicity, not passion. Then they went home. A couple of Elvis’s buddies were there, including Gene, who acted goofy, carrying around a doorknob and a sandwich and a pair of pliers in a briefcase. For dinner, the Presleys’ new black maid, Alberta, served them all meat loaf and mashed potatoes, Elvis’s favorite comfort food.
After dinner, they sat out on the front walk in lawn chairs, and Elvis took Yvonne’s hand. Then he picked up his mother’s. “My two best girls,” he said. He might as well have declared, “My past, and my future,” except that Elvis could never really let go of Gladys. He could share himself with someone, and he needed that third person to mend the ancient circle, broken long ago in Tupelo. But he could never let there be just two. It reminded Yvonne of their first date in Hollywood, when they’d gone to see James Dean’s last movie, Giant, Elvis sitting between Gladys and Yvonne, holding his mother’s hand with his right, and Yvonne’s with his left.
“Are you going to be my little girl?” he asked once Gladys had gone inside.
“Yes, darling,” she answered. But even then she realized it wouldn’t happen. “I knew from what Elvis told me that he couldn’t think of marriage for a long, long time. And I was just beginning to get the picture breaks I’d worked for since I was a child.” Most of all, life in Memphis was just too different from the way she’d grown up in Glendale.
That Saturday, Elvis took her to an all-night party at Sam Phillips’s house. She could tell Elvis hadn’t been feeling well—he had a skin infection on his shoulder, he told her, that had been bothering him for some time. “Even with all the noise and laugher, I could see Elvis was feeling worse by the minute. He was unusually quiet, and his eyes began to get a sick look.” He excused himself to talk with Sam about it.
“Elvis came out with a rash just above his pubic hair,” as Sam remembered it. “It was just what we call a nice, big ol’ risen. The doctor will call it a carbuncle. He hadn’t told anybody, and he ran around with that damn thing festering up for two months. We