Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [140]
“The beast” emerges in another famous image connected with Jailhouse Rock, a publicity photograph of Elvis in a nightclub scene with a blond striptease dancer. In it, he sits at a bar in the background, gazing up at the stripper onstage, his image framed between her legs in the foreground.
“They spent almost all day lining up the shot, shooting it, reshooting it, and changing the marks,” remembers the dancer, Gloria Pall. “He watched me so intensely every single moment of that scene. He never took his eyes off me. Even when we took a break he kept watching me. I did a whole dance for him with bumps and grinds, and I told him, ‘This reminds me of what you do.’ ”
When Gloria first arrived on the set, Elvis thought she looked familiar. Then it hit him: She was the former showgirl whose fingers he’d sucked backstage in Vegas. He walked over to her for a playful reunion.
“What are you doing here—are you an extra?” Gloria teased.
“I’m the star of the movie,” he said.
“You are? You flopped in Vegas and they made you a star?”
He liked her cool banter and invited her up to the Beverly Wilshire for a party later that night. He had Suite 850, the Presidential Suite, he told her. It was four thousand square feet of opulence, one whole wing of the hotel—four bedrooms, a living room with a fireplace, dining room, den, kitchen, library, and a butler’s pantry. “I’d love to,” she said, “but can I bring my husband?”
It took him aback.
“When did you get married?”
“About a month ago.”
“Gee,” he said. “I don’t mess with married women.”
“Well, I’m sorry about that,” she told him. “I don’t mess around either.”
That was the end of that. “But he invited me to lunch, and he held my hand all the way. He was very sweet and boyish.”
One night, Byron Raphael, the William Morris agent-in-training, took his new wife, Carolyn, to one of Elvis’s parties at the hotel. She was hoping to become an actress, and Byron could tell that Elvis found her attractive. The next day, when Elvis and Byron were sitting in his MGM dressing room, the star said, “Your wife sure is a sweet one, Byron. That’s the kind of girl I’ve been looking for. There must be hundreds of girls outside the gate. Why don’t you see if you can find me another Carolyn? In fact, take care of business for me.”
From then on, Byron began supplying him with young girls, particularly his ideal type, a five-foot-four brunette with pretty eyes and a round behind. “To him, that was the most sensual part of a woman’s body.”
As Elvis’s pimp, Byron would make one bad choice in two years—on the road, after a concert, he procured a luscious girl who stood five foot ten. He guided her into Elvis’s room without warning him that she wasn’t his usual cup of tea. Later that night, Elvis came out in his bathrobe and barked, “There were ten thousand girls out there, and you picked the only one on stilts! Don’t send any more Amazons in here!”
Though Elvis described his sexual appetites as voracious—he’d say, “I like it hot and heavy, Byron the Siren, hot and heavy”—Byron was surprised to find that Elvis was far more interested in heavy petting than doing the wild thing, especially with young virgins. One evening, he brought three young girls into Elvis’s bedroom. Soon they were all naked, but Elvis stayed in his underwear, kissing and fondling them, and eventually falling asleep with them in his arms, his own records playing softly in the background.