Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [145]
“Hey, y’all, my cunt hurts.”
What? Alan wasn’t sure he’d understood her. Surely she hadn’t said what he thought she’d said. Lamar was driving and just sat frozen at the wheel. “God,” he thought, “did I hear that? I have never—”
“Did y’all hear me? I said, ‘My cunt really hurts!’ ”
Lamar almost ran off the road—he had to stop the car—and Alan doubled over. Elvis fell on the floor, choking now, barely able to catch his breath.
“He had a Pepsi in his hand that just went up in the air all over the seat,” Anita says, “and they just died laughing.” She didn’t know why they were making such a big thing of it. Elvis had told her that now that she was going to Hollywood, she had to know the L.A. word for behind. And her rump was sore.
“He loved to pull tricks. I was so embarrassed when I found out what I’d said. It’s not that I was dumb. My family didn’t talk ugly words, and I was just very naïve.”
Anita was also ingenuous about Elvis’s ability to be faithful. Two weeks before the finals of the “Hollywood Star Hunt,” he had brought the British-born starlet Venetia Stevenson to Memphis. She had been divorced from Russ Tamblyn, Elvis’s Hollywood acquaintance, only since Valentine’s Day.
“He’d always come to me and say, ‘But, Little, you know these are just publicity stunts. It doesn’t mean anything. You’re the only one I care anything about.’ ” For proof, he wrote her mash notes: “I love you, love you, love you, you Little.”
Anita wanted to think it was true, that even though he had his arms around all those starlets and showgirls (the latest was Vegas singer Kitty Dolan) it didn’t really mean anything. “And gullible me . . . Elvis could make you believe anything.”
She moved into Graceland in 1957 and lived upstairs. “That got to be a hot and heavy affair,” in Lamar’s viewpoint. The guys weren’t sure whether she actually slept with him—there were two other bedrooms on the second floor—but they assumed not. Anita was too proper for sex before marriage, and Gladys wouldn’t have liked it going on under her roof.
Either way, says Marty Lacker, Elvis reverted to his usual ways when she was out of the house.
“One time Anita went out shopping, and Elvis brought another girl upstairs. He was fooling around with her in the bedroom, when all of a sudden, one of the guys called up and said, ‘Hey, Elvis, Anita’s coming through the gate.’
“If you looked out his window, it was a straight drop to the ground. So we put a ladder up to the window. He let the girl climb down first, and he waited about five minutes, and then he went down. Anita came in and went upstairs, and, of course, he wasn’t there. He walked around the back of the house to the front and came upstairs behind her. He said, ‘Oh, you’re home. Great.’ He would do stuff like that all the time.”
When she found out about the other women, she was hurt and angry, but she rationalized it as the actions of a man in a unique situation. “They were all available, and it was a great temptation, and he succumbed to it.”
And he was also her first love. Now she cared so much for him that when she went out to California for a movie role, she realized she didn’t really want a career if it kept them apart.
“He called me on the phone. ‘Little, I miss you. I want you to come home.’ Well, I just said okay. He met me at the airport.” Eventually she would give up her whole career.
It hadn’t meant a lot to her anyway. Her parents had always wanted her to be an entertainer, because God had given her a voice, and she did like to act and sing. “But really and truly, I just wanted to get married and have children and be a normal person. Well, with Elvis, you could never be normal. I found that out right away.”
The Colonel, for example, insisted that she and Elvis stay at different hotels when she accompanied him to California. His fans would leave him if they thought he was in love, Parker argued, and so Elvis should just say that he and Anita were dating. The manager didn’t even want them photographed together, or if