Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [141]
“He would never put himself inside one of these girls. Within minutes, he’d be asleep, and often the girl would still be rubbing herself against him. I’d step in and say, ‘It’s time to go now, honey. Elvis needs to sleep.’”
Girls would come out in tears, crying that Elvis had told them to wait until their wedding night. Or they’d get hysterical and whine that Elvis didn’t love them. Byron learned damage control on the job.
“I’d say, ‘No, that’s not true. He just wants to make sure you don’t have a baby. He’ll call you again.’ Of course, he almost never did. But with some of the younger ones, he’d be like the tooth fairy, slipping hundred-dollar bills in their schoolbooks.”
In May, Lamar Fike read in the paper that Elvis had aspirated a cap from one of his front teeth while sliding down the pole in the film’s big production number, and that he was recuperating from surgery to remove it from his lung. For several months, Fike had been living in Texas and working as a deejay. His career was short-lived—he couldn’t coordinate the turntables, check the Teletype machine, read the barometer, and get the commercials in order at the same time. “One day I just put an LP on, locked the doors, and got in the car. I heard the record going chick, chick, chick on my way out of town. That was my way of signing off.”
Now Lamar picked up the phone and called Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles. He asked for Elvis’s room, and the operator patched him through. Elvis answered the phone himself.
“I told him about my little exit from the radio station, and he laughed and said, ‘What are you going to do?’ I said I didn’t know, and he said, ‘Get your ass out here.’ ” Fueled on uppers, Lamar climbed in his new two-door 1956 Bel-Air Chevy and drove thirty-six hours straight on Route 66 to Los Angeles. From then on, he was an official part of Elvis’s entourage, and within a day, Elvis would get him work as an extra, along with Gene, Cliff, Junior, and George.
At the Beverly Wilshire, Lamar was surprised to see Natalie Wood, whom he had met in Memphis on Audubon Drive.
“By now I knew that Natalie was a good person, but she wasn’t very sure of herself, and you never knew what she was going to do. One day, she got out on the window ledge at the hotel. She must have liked Elvis better than she did in Memphis, because she said she was going to commit suicide over him.
“I came running in to Elvis, and I said, “She’s out on that thing! She’s going to jump!’ He said, ‘She won’t jump.’ I said, ‘I’m telling you, she’s going to do it!’ She crouched out there about half an hour—promising, swearing—she was going to jump. He finally talked her back in. He said, ‘Nat, come and sit down and quit being so dramatic.’ She came back in, and I just collapsed in a chair. But Elvis was real nonchalant. He said, ‘I told you she wouldn’t do it.’ ”
As filming began, Elvis had a date with Anne Neyland, who had a credited, but minor, role in the picture. But as on his first two films, where he’d set the precedent, he quickly turned his attention to his costar. Judy Tyler was a newlywed, having just married second husband Gregory LaFayette in March. Despite what the singer told Gloria Pall about not fooling around with married women, “she and Elvis had a thing going,” according to Lamar.
At twenty-three, Judy Tyler (real name Judith Hess) was a tough cookie and a show business veteran with a pedigree—her father, Julian Hess, was well known as a trumpeter for Benny Goodman and Paul Whiteman, and her mother, Loreleo Kendler, danced with the Ziegfeld Follies. At sixteen, Judy had won a Miss Stardust beauty contest, which led to a job as a singer-chorine at the Copacabana nightclub. In 1951, when she auditioned for—and won—the part of Princess Summerfall Winterspring on The Howdy Doody Show children’s program, the irrepressibly sexy seventeen-year-old failed to mention that she was married, to twenty-six-year-old Colin Romoff, the Copa pianist and her vocal coach.
She lasted two years as the grown-up puppet, but by then she had quite a reputation, drinking and stripping