Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [166]
The German papers made a big splash of the couple, and soon she was the most-talked-about woman in the country, receiving dozens of letters a day. “She’s blond and has blue eyes,” Elvis told an Armed Forces Network reporter. “I’ve seen her about five times already, which is more than any other girl ’round here.” He bought her a wristwatch, and she showed it off in the press. Elvis called her “Little Puppy.”
Back in Memphis, the other “Little” blinked at what she read. She could believe that reporters made up quotes sometimes, as Elvis always told her. But Anita’s face flushed when she saw the pictures of him with his arms around another blonde, holding her close and looking deeply into her eyes. She fired off three letters to him about her disappointment.
“Well, I can’t blame you,” Elvis quickly answered, “especially since that mess was written about ‘Little Puppy,’ and all that horseshit.” He then explained how they met, that she was a photographer’s model, and a newsman had brought her over the first week he was in Germany.
“I have seen her one time since then,” he lied, his letter postmarked on the same day he told Alan about his affair. “I have not been dating her, and . . . I have not tried to keep anything from you. . . . Every night, I lay in my bunk, I see your little eyes and your little nose, and it’s almost like you are here, like you are pressed up close to me. I can feel your little hair on the side of my face and sometimes I get so excited and want you so bad I start sweating. WOW!”
In closing, he told her their song from now on was “[Please] Love Me Forever,” by Tommy Edwards. “Every night I play it just for you,” Elvis wrote.
But he was also playing the record for Margit. He was seeing her several times a week now, either in Bad Nauheim or at the home she shared with her mother in Frankfurt-Eschersheim. He drove the thirty miles alone in his white BMW 507, parking his car in the American Forces Network lot, with the staff instructed not to bother him. As the relationship wore on, he sent a taxi driver, Josef Wehrheim, to Frankfurt for her twice a month.
Elvis and Margit went to the movies, to the Frankfurt Zoo, talked in back corners of nightclubs where they could hold hands undisturbed (he particularly liked La Parisienne), and cuddled at the parties Elvis held at the hotel. They were known to spend the night together on several occasions in both cities. But the romance was hampered by the fact that Margit spoke only minimal English, and so they communicated in other ways.
“He is shy and rarely speaks about himself,” the teenager told reporter Mike Tomkies about her boyfriend. “He’s not at all conceited. He doesn’t like to go out often. We spend evenings listening to pop records, or he would play the piano and sing folk songs. . . . He plays the guitar, and says as little as possible about his success as a singer.”
But if Elvis was modest, Margit was eager for attention and posed for cheesecake shots published in Overseas Weekly, the American G.I. magazine. Look magazine, too, would feature them together, Margit saying, “He’s so different from what I thought he’d be.” Elvis was embarrassed—it put him in more of a jam with Anita—and he felt exploited.
“She went and got herself pinup pictures made,” Red said at the time, “and spread them all over the front pages as Elvis Presley’s German fräulein. Elvis doesn’t like that. It made him mad. He certainly liked her a lot, but after that he never saw her again.”
Lamar remembers it differently. “Elvis dated her on and off the whole time he was in Germany, but the heavy stuff lasted about two months. Then he got tired of her and went to somebody else.”
When Memphis disc jockey Keith Sherriff asked him about her in a phone interview in early 1959, Elvis replied, “Don’t get me wrong, she’s a cute little girl and all of that, but it’s mostly a lot of publicity.”
Margit did not take it well. “I feel mad and humiliated,” she complained. “All the girls