Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [173]
“They were very ordinary, with belching and farting and everything that belongs with it.” And her mother objected to their foul language, their refrigerator raids, and their penchant for putting their feet on the table. Elvis suggested his friends check into the nearby Hotel Edelweiss, where they got caught and were evicted for bringing women in through the window. Elvis, meanwhile, remained the Tschechowas’ houseguest.
In the next two days, Elvis and Vera watched a Viking movie in production at the Bavaria Film Studios in Geiselgasteig, and took a boat ride on Lake Starnberg, a popular recreational area. “Elvis was after her, all right,” Lamar remembers, but in the photographs, neither looks especially happy to be there.
Elvis’s trip to Munich would be far more memorable for his three visits to the Moulin Rouge, a strip club, where he was photographed in suggestive poses with a number of scantily clad dancers, B-girls, and hookers. In several shots, he is shown aggressively kissing twin showgirls, the Orkowskis, first pushing one back along a stair rail, and then mashing the other against the opposite wall. He was also photographed in similar situations at another location, the Eve Bar, on his first night there.
In contrast to the playful and sexy tone of Al Wertheimer’s famous photograph, The Kiss, shot in Richmond, Virginia, only three years earlier, the German pictures, most of them taken by Rudolf Paulini, the house photographer of the Moulin Rouge, have a seedy, depraved, and somewhat pornographic feel about them. Elvis seems dazed, almost in a trance, and the women, predatory and reptilian, have a nightmarish look, as if sprung from a vampire’s dream. The photographs run totally at odds with Elvis’s wholesome, all-American image and are, in fact, so sensational and shocking that they might have ruined him had they been published at the time. They look, says rock critic Dave Marsh, like “the answer to a question no one thought to ask.”
Vera found her Moulin Rouge evening unpleasant for another reason. While Red and Lamar always understood that part of their role was to protect Elvis in all ways, Vera resented how they cautioned him to reel in his behavior. They tossed a comb across the table at him and told him to straighten his hair, she said, and when he got up to sing with the band, Red reminded him that the Colonel had prohibited public performances. Even a glass of champagne was off limits, Lamar insisted, and embarrassed him, Vera thought, by suggesting he drink tomato juice instead. Yet ironically, Elvis enjoyed more freedom in Germany than he did at any other time in his life.
There are conflicting stories about how Elvis and Vera felt about each other, and why they never saw each other after March. Thomas Beyl, a family friend, reported that Ada Tschechowa found Elvis and Vera together upstairs in Vera’s bedroom and kicked him out. And Elvis was quoted in the press as saying, “Sure, I’ve got a new girlfriend . . . I’ve been to visit her family in Munich . . . but it’s just good fun.”
Yet Vera steadfastly denied that anything romantic occurred between them (“I’ve got tired of all the fantastic stuff they write about Elvis and me—it seems hard to get through with the truth”), and suggested that she was interested only in the publicity value of being photographed with an American rock star. She insisted that her mother asked him to leave because he had “bothered our animals, canaries, dogs, and cats long enough.”
Besides, he was more interested in one of the Moulin Rouge striptease girls than he was in her, Vera said. And, indeed, according to Andreas Roth, author of The Ultimate Elvis in Munich Book, Elvis had an affair with a Moulin Rouge dancer