Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [174]
When Elvis returned from Munich, he made a number of lengthy phone calls to Anita Wood. But it was clear to Red and Lamar that he was outgrowing her. He also seemed less considerate of Elisabeth Stefaniak, who did everything she could to please him, even improving on his favorite snack—mashed-banana-and-peanut-butter sandwiches—by frying them in a skillet like a grilled cheese.
In late March, Vernon and Elisabeth were hurt in a car crash on the autobahn, returning from a shopping trip at the PX in Frankfurt. Vernon, driving the big Mercedes, attempted to pass another car, when a vehicle pulled out in front of them. He slammed on the brakes, but the Mercedes fishtailed and spun out of control, rolling several times before slamming into a tree and landing on its roof. The car was a total loss. Elisabeth suffered head wounds from broken glass, and at first she couldn’t move, fearing her back was broken. She arrived home on a stretcher.
It was a terrifying ordeal, and both Elisabeth and Vernon might have been killed. But Elvis’s reaction shook her up almost as much as the wreck. He raced out to the accident scene in his BMW, but later he took her aside. “Foghorn,” he said. “Be straight with me. Were you and my daddy messing around with each other while he was driving the car?”
Vernon had no romantic interest in Elisabeth, but his relationship with Dee Stanley had escalated from a fling to a full-fledged affair. At first Elvis and Vernon fought about it, and then Elvis realized that his father was lonely and needed company. “Bring her over to the house,” he said.
But when Vernon did arrive with Dee, they almost always disappeared into his bedroom, right off the living room. Elvis confessed to Anita Wood that he had once peeped through the keyhole. “I have hated Dee ever since then,” he told Anita. Not only did the affair come too soon after Gladys’s death, Elvis thought, but his father also embarrassed him with their antics.
When Dee was in the throes of sexual pleasure, Lamar reports, she was not a quiet woman. “When they started banging, Dee would start screaming. God, Almighty, she’d scream so loud you could hear her all over the house. Elvis would turn sixteen shades of red. We’d be in the living room, and he would look at me and say, ‘I can’t stand this. It’s driving me crazy!’ Sometimes he’d just go upstairs. Or Vernon would come out of the room about twenty minutes later, and he’d be real cocky, and he’d sit there.
“One time Elvis said, ‘Daddy, you need to take her in a car or take her out somewhere. Don’t do it in here. Everybody in the house is hearing this.’ But it got worse and worse. One time, they spent over an hour in there, and Elvis had about fifteen people in the house. When Dee started to holler, Elvis got up and started playing the piano so damn loud it made Liberace sound like a paraplegic. He beat that piano to death, man.”
But the son had learned from the father. When Freddy Bienstock arrived in Bad Nauheim a few months later to help Elvis pick songs for his first postarmy movie, G.I. Blues, he found himself in the middle of a southern gothic novel—he could hear both Elvis and his father having sex in the house.
In June, after Dee had gone home to Virginia with her three sons, leaving her husband in Germany, Vernon followed her to persuade her to seek a divorce. The relationship had grown so serious that on this same trip, he drove her to Louisville to meet his father, Jessie. Then he returned to Germany and told Elvis they’d decided to marry.
Red, too, left the country, going home about the same time for good. He had come to Germany with