Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [149]
“That whole Christmas was like a kid’s dream,” Billy remembers. A couple of Christmases before, the Smith children had gone to the Goodfellows dinner for underprivileged kids. Now Aunt Gladys had “all kinds of good things to eat for the holidays,” and the house was decorated with holly and berries. “It was a fun time,” Anita confirms, and Gladys made herself get in the spirit for her first Christmas at Graceland. “She would look at Elvis, and grit her teeth and talk this baby talk, and he would do it back to her. They were gritting their teeth at each other.”
By the time next Christmas rolled around, Gladys told Elvis, she hoped he and Anita would be married with a blond-headed baby on the way. They talked about it, Anita says. If it were a girl, they’d call her Alisa Marie. But Gladys wanted a boy, Elvis Jr. “She said, ‘I can just see him running up and down the driveway in his little bare feet.’ She was trying to plan Elvis’s future, not having any idea of things that were going down.’ ”
At twenty-three, the most famous man in the world was in no hurry to marry, especially since his military service was upon him. The younger Elvis proposed marriage quickly and often, but he was now past such impetuous actions. Lamar understood the changes.
“As kids, we were taught that you grow up, get married, and smoke cigarettes. That’s just what you did. But he really didn’t want to get married. Because we’d go on the coast, and he’d get loose and chase everything that was moving.”
In early 1958, Anita went with Elvis to New Orleans for location shooting on King Creole, his fourth and best film. But she stayed back at the hotel on Parker’s orders, as she did in Los Angeles: Anita ensconced at the Knickerbocker, and Elvis at the Beverly Wilshire.
On the set, he took a shine to seventeen-year-old June Wilkinson, who had just come over from England at the invitation of Hugh Hefner and Playboy magazine. (Hef dubbed her “The Bosom.”) The amply endowed cheesecake model (43-22-37) had been trained as a ballerina, but began her career as a topless dancer at age fifteen, joining London’s Windmill Theatre as a fan dancer in 1957. June would later gain fame as a platinum-haired vixen in the mode of Jayne Mansfield. But at the time Elvis met her, she was a stunning brunette and merely a young friend of the choreographer on the picture.
“Elvis came over and started talking to me,” June recalls of their meeting, “and he said, ‘Would you like to have dinner?’ A seventeen-year-old girl, of course, I would like to have dinner!”
He sent a car to bring her to his hotel, and then in his usual approach, he offered to show her the luxurious suite. When they got to his bedroom, “He started kissing me, which was okay with me, and then he wanted to make love.” But June was a virgin and intended to stay that way.
She thought Elvis would surely cut the evening short when she told him. But instead, “He said, ‘Oh, okay,’ and sat me on his bed, got out his guitar, and sang to me for a couple of hours. I was so impressed. He knew he wasn’t going to get anyplace with me, and it didn’t matter.”
Even Sophia Loren flipped for him during a chance meeting on the Paramount lot while filming Desire Under the Elms. A studio photographer captured the meeting of the two international sex symbols, her arms around his neck, flirty smiles all around.
King Creole, based on Harold Robbins’s gritty novel A Stone for Danny Fisher, offered Elvis a magnificent role as a young singer navigating the mob-controlled New Orleans club scene. His work reflects his close study of Brando and Dean, and finds him worthy of leading a first-rate cast, including Walter Matthau (as Maxie, the crime boss) and Carolyn Jones (Maxie’s jaded mistress, who also has a soft spot for Danny).
Elvis’s scenes with the exotic Jones proved powerful and poignant. (“He was always asking a lot of questions,” she remembered. “God, he was young! He was always talking about his folks and the house he’d just bought them.”) But he took more pleasure in reuniting with Dolores Hart,