Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [172]
But a third photo, taken in January, involved Vera, who had just made a film in America and who conveniently spoke English. Now only thirteen years after the end of World War II, it seemed a perfect moment of German–American alliance. Vera and Elvis stood on either side of Robert, Vera holding one of the boy’s hands, and Elvis the other. But the way Elvis looked at the comely brunette, Robert might as well have not even been in the room.
Vera was far more worldly than Margit Buergin. Her grandfather was the nephew of Anton Chekhov, the famous Russian playwright, and her grandmother Olga one of the most popular stars of the silent film era. A favorite of Adolf Hitler (she always called him “The Führer”), Olga was reputedly a Russian agent in Nazi Germany. (“They had handwritten notes from Hitler on their walls in Munich,” says Lamar.) Vera’s mother, Ada, was likewise an actress in films, and Vera was following in their footsteps. She had just been voted Germany’s number one pinup girl, with some sixty-five fan clubs, and the German papers were keen to turn her slight involvement with Elvis into a romance, whether it really blossomed into one or not.
When interviewed about Elvis in the 1970s, Vera seemed to find the entire subject distasteful, beginning with the notion of posing with Elvis and a disabled boy. Her involvement with the photographs came about because “somehow they were missing a woman to be used like parsley or trimming.”
“We took these horrible pictures,” she said. “What terrible trash. The child bound to a wheelchair, and Elvis standing with the child. I was somewhere with the nervous parents. I talked a little bit with him. Not much, just a couple of sentences.”
“Vera was a strange girl,” in Lamar’s view. “The longer you were around her, the crazier she got.” He warned Elvis to stay away from her, he says, but Elvis, who called her “Kitty Cat” for the shape and color of her eyes, was intent on pursuing her. “Once Elvis had her in his crosshairs, there was no turning him back.”
In early March, he got a three-day pass and went to Munich to see her, planning also to take in the nightclubs with Red and Lamar. The driver, Josef Wehrheim, motored them over in Elvis’s new 300 Mercedes four-door sedan, and they accepted an invitation to stay with the Tschechowas in Obermenzing. A photographer from Bild Zeitung, Germany’s answer to the National Enquirer, accompanied Elvis and Vera on their dates. According to Lamar, the magazine had already photographed the two in Bad Nauheim at the Hotel Grunewald. And Rex remembers that she invited the whole group to a local movie theater to see one of her films, Elisabeth translating the dialogue.
Now Vera was performing in a minor play, The Seducer, in Munich’s Theatre unter den Arkaden, a small boulevard venue in the Maximilianstrasse. Elvis told Vera’s mother, Ada, that he wanted to see it.
“You won’t understand a word of it,” she said.
“That doesn’t matter,” he replied, and then rented out the entire theater for himself and Red and Lamar. It was more of a grand romantic gesture than a practical act for a star who might be mobbed. And when Elvis sat in the first row, beaming up at her, Vera found it embarrassing and “miserable” to perform with only three people in front of the stage. Afterward, he took her mother and her theatrical friends to an expensive dinner at the Kanne restaurant, Red and Lamar tagging along.
“Red and I felt funny around Vera,” Lamar remembers. “It was like she was already looking down her nose at us.” Vera and Ada, however, found it odd that Elvis’s bodyguards, as