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Again, Elvis showed interest in her (he nicknamed her “Whistle Britches”), and again, Dolores demurred. She played with his pompadour on the set, but she might as well have been his sister.

Elvis didn’t push himself on her, because it wasn’t right to do so. It was the same with their characters’ relationship, too. He understood this so innately that in a rare display of assertiveness, he challenged director Curtiz about a scene in which Danny tricks Nellie into going to a hotel. Still shots remain in which the two sit together on the bed, with Nellie about to unfasten her dress.

As the actress remembers, the scene wasn’t effective. “It was Elvis who finally called a halt to it. He said, ‘I just don’t see how Nellie would even come this far. She wouldn’t have me take her dress down and then say no.’ I agreed with him.”

After King Creole wrapped in March 1958, Dolores never saw Elvis again, though he wrote her postcards from his military service in Germany, asking, “What’s doing, hot lips?” It was a private joke, since they’d been forced to do one of their kissing scenes in 104-degree temperature. Elvis was “like a young animal,” she told a British reporter. “He doesn’t have much refinement, but this is part of his charm.”

Still, stories swirled that she left show business and became a nun because she was pregnant with his child. Today, Mother Dolores is, indeed, a Benedictine nun at the Convent of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut. But she didn’t enter the order until 1963—five years after making King Creole.

Philip Stanic, an entertainer who calls himself Elvis Presley Jr. (born December 24, 1961, in Gary, Indiana), initially said he believed that he was the actors’ illegitimate son. Now, however, he claims his birth mother was the late actress Angelique Pettijohn, an extra in Elvis’s 1961 film Blue Hawaii.

Elvis was always a business associate and not a close friend, Dolores insisted. Yet she spent enough time around him to make some observations. In 1959, a movie magazine quoted her as saying, “Elvis is a young man with an enormous capacity of love . . . but I don’t think he has found his happiness. I think he is terribly lonely.”

In 2003, she spoke of her most abiding memory of him, which occurred during the making of Loving You. They were out in the country, and they’d finished filming for the day.

“There were some horses around . . . and we were just laughing and enjoying being out there. He was standing by a rail, and he had his arms reaching out each side of it. He put his head back . . . he was looking up to the sky, and he was so beautiful and real. And for a moment, he just looked so peaceful.”

Elvis had finally found some footing in a world he, himself, had turned upside down. Now the army was about to separate him from everything that mattered: his fame, his career, and most of all, his deathly ill mother.

On leave from the army, Elvis posed for this formal portrait with his parents at Graceland, June 1958. Gladys would die before the summer was out. (Robin Rosaaen Collection)

Chapter Fifteen

Private Presley

On January 1, 1958, Jimmie Rodgers Snow, who had been Elvis’s roommate on some of the early tours, arrived at Graceland for an extended visit. Elvis had run into Hank’s son backstage at the Grand Ole Opry eleven days earlier, when he’d gone to Nashville to deliver the Colonel’s Isetta sports car. Elvis invited him over to take part in his last big hurrah—a man-child marathon of roller-rink bashing, motorcycle riding, and all-night movies—before leaving to make King Creole and then going off to the service.

They’d had a long talk one night. Jimmie laughed about opening for Elvis in Texas in 1955, saying how the “Memphis Flash” came out in “a chartreuse jacket and black pants with a white stripe down the side, and the kids were just going wild.” And he remembered “how cool he was in my mind. I wanted to sing like him. I wanted to dress like him, and do things that I never cared about till I met him.”

Elvis was studying his script