Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [169]
She would hear him with other girls through the walls, too, and even if she thought he was not doing any more with them than he was with her, it made her feel empty inside.
“There would be at least a couple of girls each week, more on weekends. . . . These were often very beautiful girls [but] although I resented them, I knew they were not staying . . . I did not let him see me cry [and] all the time I was telling myself how lucky I was.”
Elvis never apologized or tried to explain his actions. “I guess he never felt he owed me an explanation. I do remember the pain of getting into bed with him maybe ten or twenty minutes after another girl had left. Many times we never made love. He would sometimes just give me a good-night kiss and go to sleep. It was like a comfort thing for him.”
Elisabeth could see that the combination of events—his mother’s death, his father’s fling with a married woman, his being away from home, friends, and family back in the States, and the potential loss of his career—served to make a private, much darker Elvis emerge during his time in Germany. His hot-flash temper seemed nearer the surface, “mostly when he would say harsh things to you. I never saw him throw things at me, but he could say some hurtful things.”
The worst of it came one day on a shopping trip. There were things he needed for himself, and he wanted to buy Elisabeth some clothes. While they were out, he picked a waste can he wanted for his bathroom. “I said, ‘Elvis, you already have a basket in your bathroom.’ Well, that was the wrong thing to say. He turned to me and said, ‘Don’t you ever tell me what to buy or not to buy! If I want to buy a thousand trash cans . . .’ ”
It was an awkward moment, a terrible moment, and when they walked out of the store, he was still angry. “I was going to buy you some clothes, but you ticked me off,” he told her. “Then for two days he didn’t speak to me very much.”
She never got the wardrobe, but Rex put such behavior down to his friend’s natural complexity, now exacerbated by his pressures, including the expectation of being the perfect soldier, one who could never grumble or gripe like any other G.I. He had no real way to blow off steam when he was tired, discouraged, upset, lonesome, or bored. The press would have a field day with it, and Colonel Parker would have threatened to leave him—the last thing Elvis wanted when he was so insecure about his future.
He bought a Grundig tape recorder to make some home recordings (“Danny Boy,” “Mona Lisa”), thinking music would be his outlet. But Rex thought it was more than just situational circumstances, that Elvis was in a serious psychological slide. “Elvis,” Rex says, “had two definite and distinct personalities.”
He was promoted to private first class during the holidays, the army saying he was a soldier of “above normal capability.” But since it was his first Christmas without his mother, he was not in much of a mood to celebrate. It was “dismal,” as Lamar remembers. They set up a tree, and everybody went through the motions of giving presents. But it didn’t seem like Christmas, not even when Elvis sang an affecting rendition of “Silent Night” for the other soldiers. The guys bought some fireworks to cheer him, and Elvis, caught up in the moment, blasted German civilians from the balcony of the Hotel Grunewald, which got him in trouble with the owner, Herr Otto Schmidt.
They were already on thin ice. Red had accidentally shot Herr Schmidt with a spring-loaded stopper gun, leaving a wooden stick dangling from a suction cup on his forehead. And Elvis had been reprimanded for other crazy stunts—water gun duels, wrestling matches, and noisy pillow fights in the hallways. Then Lamar bought a cane to torment an old lady who beat her own cane on the ceiling to tell them to pipe down. “It like to drove her crazy. She’d pound on that ceiling like there was no tomorrow, and I’d beat back on the floor like there was no tonight.”
But the worst of it was when they nearly set fire to the hotel. In the middle of a shaving cream fight, Elvis locked himself