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Years after their relationship, Margit would suggest that it was she who broke things off, because Elvis insisted that he belonged to his fans, and therefore could not consider marriage.

“I’m a corporation, not a man,” he told her. “Sure, I want to get married and have kids. But for me it’s impossible.”

Late in the fall, when Elvis was still involved with Margit, he received a call from Devada “Dee” Elliott Stanley, the wife of Bill Stanley, a much-decorated American master sergeant stationed in Frankfurt. Dee, the mother of three young boys, Billy, Ricky, and David, was unhappy in her marriage. Her husband, who had been one of General George S. Patton’s drivers, was a mean drunk, and Dee found Elvis a delicious diversion. She invited him to dinner with her family, but Elvis had a good excuse—he was about to go to Grafenwöhr, on the Czech border, for six weeks of reconnaissance maneuvers. He’d be up to his elbows in snow.

However, Vernon, who was growing a Boston Blackie mustache, offered himself as a stand-in for a coffee date. Dee, a bottle blonde given to showy clothing, had a come-hither tone in her voice that let him know she would make it worth his while. The fact that she was married didn’t faze him, since he’d been carrying on his own escapades for years, and had begun fooling around with at least two women in Killeen in the days after Gladys’s death. For her part, Dee wanted anyone who was close to Elvis. “Boy,” says Lamar, “she stalked him like prize game.”

Like Elvis, Vernon, who started hanging out in the little bars around Bad Nauheim, drinking vodka or bourbon and Coke and buying rounds for women at Elvis’s expense, could compartmentalize sex and love. Before coming overseas, he and his son had gone to the Memphis Memorial Studio and ordered an enormous monument for Gladys’s grave, replete with Italian statuary—a towering cross with a beckoning Jesus and attendant angels. In November, they were proud to learn that the accompanying marker had been completed. The inscription: “She was the sunshine of our home.”

On November 20, 1958, Elvis and Rex Mansfield went to the movies at the post theater in Grafenwöhr, which was often their habit. Rex, from the little town of Dresden, Tennessee, 120 miles north of Memphis, remained Elvis’s closest army buddy. They’d been inducted together, gone through basic together, and traveled on the same train to New York and ship to Germany. Elvis called him “Rexadus.” There wasn’t much they hadn’t shared.

Waiting at the theater that night was a nineteen-year-old German girl, Elisabeth Stefaniak, the modest and well-groomed stepdaughter of an American sergeant. Elisabeth was infatuated with everything about Elvis—his looks, his music, his voice, his movies, and his celebrity status. She’d read in Stars and Stripes that Elvis went to the theater every night in Grafenwöhr, entering after the lights went down, and leaving shortly before the movie was over. She saw it as her chance to get an autograph.

When she got there, “All the G.I.s were coming in, and in their crew cuts they all looked the same. So I asked the manager and he told me approximately where they were sitting.

“I saw one soldier who was sitting in that area get up, and he came back to get some popcorn. I was waiting in the lobby in the dark, and I asked him, ‘Are you sitting anywhere near Elvis?’ and he said, ‘Yes, in fact, I’m sitting right next to him.’ I said, ‘Would you please just get me an autograph?’ And he said, ‘Sure,’ and went back inside.” Moments later, Rex appeared and told her that Elvis would like her to come down and sit with him.

Elvis took a shine to the dark-haired girl, finding her body, as he would later tell Joe Esposito, “voluptuous.” He walked her home that evening and surprised her with a good-night kiss. For the next six nights, she met him at the theater, and then he dropped in at her apartment unexpectedly for Thanksgiving and met her parents.

“Everything was ‘Yes, ma’am’ and ‘No, ma’am,’ ” Elisabeth remembers.