Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [165]
Among them would be almost daily missives from Colonel Parker. He typed them himself, using the hunt-and-peck method, apprising Elvis and Vernon of all his hard work and bragging about his efforts. Before Elvis sailed for Europe, Parker promised him he would be a bigger star when he came home than he had been when he left. Already, the manager had negotiated new contracts with Twentieth Century-Fox and Paramount for huge increases in fees—$150,000 more than what Elvis would have gotten under the original contract at Paramount, he crowed.
The Colonel couldn’t travel to Europe because as an illegal alien, he had no passport. But even from afar, he ruled with an iron hand. When Elvis told him Anita Wood was planning to come for an extended visit, Parker insisted she stay home. The press would have them engaged or getting married, and Elvis didn’t need that kind of publicity, especially not now.
On October 28, 1958, Elvis wrote Anita a three-page letter on Hotel Grunewald stationery. He called her often (“weird hours . . . very late, because the time change was so different”), but this was his first letter to her from Europe, and his first ever “in a hundred years,” he said. But there were so many things he wanted to tell her and couldn’t say over the phone, he wrote, his handwriting making big loops of his ts and ys.
His words were intensely romantic, Elvis lapsing into predictable lovers’ language about how much he missed her, and saying he kept her picture by his bed. But then, after insisting, “I haven’t dated a single girl since I have been here,” he took on a serious tone.
I want to explain something to you, and you have got to trust me and believe me, because I am very sincere when I say it. I will tell you this much. I have never and never will again love anyone like I love you, sweetheart. Also, I guarantee that when I marry, it will be Miss Little Presley Wood. There is a lot you have to understand, though. Only God knows when the time will be right. So you have to consider this and love me, trust me and keep yourself clean and wholesome, because that is the big thing that can determine our lives and happiness together.
No matter what I’m doing, whether it be the army, making movies, traveling or singing, I will be thinking of the time when we have our first “little Elvis Presley.” So keep this in mind and don’t get discouraged and lonely. Just remember this is a guy that loves you with all his heart and wants to marry you.
Such demonstrative words must have been a comfort to Anita. Except what Elvis didn’t mention was that on October 5, while showing his family around a park in Bad Homburg, twenty-three-year-old Elvis had met sixteen-year-old Margit Buergin, a pretty blond stenographer for an electrical company in Frankfurt. It had happened as soon as they left the Ritters Park Hotel that evening, when a group of shutterbugs from the German tabloids “descended on us like a horde of locusts,” in Lamar’s words. Robert Lebeck, well known for his photographs of politicians and show business personalities, had asked the petite beauty to come with him, thinking a pose of the most famous American G.I. with an attractive German girl would make a salable picture. Lebeck asked Elvis to kiss her, and Elvis obliged, and then wanted more. He began seeing her immediately.
Elvis was so smitten with her that he mentioned her in his one letter to Alan Fortas, which he wrote from maneuvers in Grafenwöhr, Bavaria, on November 14. “I have been dating this little German ‘Chuckaloid