Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [171]
“After taking my first pill,” Rex later wrote in his memoir, Sergeant Presley: Our Untold Story of Elvis’ Missing Years, “I actually felt the hair on my head standing up and a surge of energy bolting through my body. Elvis was completely right about one thing—that white pill provided me with an abundance of strength and energy I didn’t know I had. I could take them and stay awake an entire weekend. I was astonished that after taking only one pill, I could easily go 24 hours without food or sleep. And they were harmless!”
Any time Rex ran out, Elvis handed him a hundred.
Vernon knew about the amphetamines and on occasion took them himself. Elisabeth, too, was aware of them, as Elvis gave her some on the nights they went to the shows and clubs in Frankfurt. He particularly liked the Holiday on Ice extravaganza, as he’d become enamored of several of the skaters, who numbered among the women who came home with him. “Beautiful girls were constantly coming and going,” Elisabeth found. “I had to painfully accept this, and just grin and bear it.”
With Gladys’s death, says Lamar, “he just let loose sexually. He was after everything he could get. I watched it change. But he had no compunction about that kind of stuff. To him, it was just banging. He had absolutely no guilt and no trouble balancing his behavior with his religious beliefs.”
Hit-and-run sex, then, was a way for Elvis to shut out his grief, forfeit his past, and quell his inhibitions. He was the most famous man on the planet, a millionaire several times over, with the world at his feet. But he had lost the only thing in life he truly loved. It was as if the devil himself had set a price for him to pay. But the excitement and arousal of a young girl made a lot of things go away—the Assembly of God church, Judge Marion Gooding, and his regret over Dixie and June. In the dark, skin on skin, everything felt good and right. It made him feel alive. It made him feel that Satnin’ was still alive, and he could pat on her and call her baby. That’s all he knew, and that’s all he wanted to know for the moment.
Several of the guys, especially Rex, felt sorry for Elisabeth and wondered about the cruelty and callousness with which Elvis paraded girls in front of her. “Sometimes she looked like she was about to cry,” Rex later wrote. She was completely in love with Elvis. And it was deflating and degrading for her to spend all day answering his love letters, and then hear his muffled moans with others through the walls.
Near the end of 1958, he had told her that a girl named Janie Wilbanks was coming to visit, and he wanted Elisabeth to make her feel at home, even share her office-bedroom. Janie had been the girl George Klein introduced him to at the train refueling in Memphis. George had only just met her himself that day, when she walked up to him at the station. Even George was taken with her (“I don’t know if she went to Ole Miss at the time, but she was a typical Ole Miss beautiful girl”), and he figured Elvis would like her, too. She had coal black eyes.
A photographer had captured their kiss and put it on the newswire. But more important, Elvis had called George two weeks later, saying, “Who in the hell was that girl? Man, she was good-looking! Tell her to send me some pictures and write to me.” That December, she came to Germany to see her uncle, an army captain, and stayed with Elvis for a week. Elisabeth was “instantly jealous” but ended up making friends with the pretty eighteen-year-old, as they both realized they were just two of the thousands of girls vying for his affections.
The next glint in his eye was an eighteen-year-old actress, the delicate, green-eyed Vera Tschechowa, whom he’d met in January 1959 while doing publicity pictures for Confidential magazine, building on a session he’d done in late 1958 for the March of