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By Root 1843 0

Elvis fresh out of the marines, where he’d spent two years in Spain, and he was tired of military life. But he also complained that Elvis treated him like a “Chinese coolie.” Vernon, with whom Red was constantly at loggerheads over his temper and his habit of getting in fights at Beck’s Bar, gave Red and Lamar only a pittance in spending money—a couple of marks at best, barely enough for a beer—and Elvis refused to do anything about it. Around the time of his departure, Elvis was hospitalized with what was reported to be tonsillitis, though the inside story had it that he suffered carbon monoxide poisoning from a jerry-rigged heater in his jeep.

In Red’s absence, Elvis got antsy for another of his pals from home, and instructed Lamar to “call Cliff and tell him to get the hell over here.”

Cliff, being Cliff, accepted Elvis’s plane ticket but took his time getting to Bad Nauheim, flying first to Paris to visit friends and then going on to Munich and staying several weeks. “Where is the son of a bitch?” Elvis asked. Cliff finally showed up in Bad Nauheim and then took off in Elvis’s Volkswagen. He was gone for a month. Eventually he came back and announced, “I’m not going to stay around and shine some fuckin’ shoes.” He took Elvis’s Mercedes 220 and moved in with Currie Grant, a clerk for Air Force Intelligence at Schierstein, near Wiesbaden, for three months.

Soon Currie and Cliff would be regular fixtures at the parties at the house, along with a smart Chicago street kid named Joe Esposito, part of the Twenty-seventh Artillery. Joe, whose parents had immigrated to America from Calabria, Italy, was friends with the family of Tony Accardo, Chicago’s last great mob boss. He was also a decent touch football player in Elvis’s weekend games, and the man to see for a bit of loan sharking.

That June, Elvis took off on a fifteen-day furlough that mixed a bit of business and sightseeing with a large sampling of sex. He first returned to Munich, where he checked into the Hotel Bayerischer Hof, and spent his nights at the Moulin Rouge, making time with his favorite dancers, including one named Marianne, who demonstrated a strip routine wearing nothing but an Elvis record. Then along with Rex, Lamar, and Charlie, he took the train from Frankfurt to Paris. There, Freddy Bienstock and his cousin, Jean Aberbach, another of Elvis’s music publishers in Hill & Range, met them at the station. Bienstock and Aberbach, Austrian émigrés, knew Paris well, and gave Elvis and his friends a tour of the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre. After that, they settled down to discussions of music for his upcoming films—Elvis, now influenced by European songs, wanted a larger, more operatic sound—and Elvis gave a press conference in the lounge of the Hotel Prince de Galles. A room service waiter told the press that during Elvis’s stay in a top-floor suite overlooking the Champs-Elysées, young women were seen “going in and out of Monsieur Presley’s suite, in and out, like a door revolving.”

In the day, Elvis was mobbed on the streets, which boosted his ego and eased his fears about being forgotten. At night, he enjoyed himself at the famous Parisian burlesque houses and nightclubs—Le Bantu, the Folies-Bergère, Carousel, the original Moulin Rouge, Le Café de Paris, and the Lido, with its famous seminude revue featuring the high-kicking, London-based Bluebell Girls, who performed the cancan in “glittering clouds of sequins, ostrich feathers, voluminous headgear, and not a great deal else,” as the New York Times once noted.

When Elvis took the guys backstage after the first show, Rex was astonished to see girls roaming around naked “without batting an eyelash. I just about fainted at the sight,” he said. Later he learned that Elvis and Lamar had put the girls up to having a little fun with him.

The Bluebell Girls, considered the most glamorous chorus line in Paris, inspired Elvis to indulge his friends in a smorgasbord of sex.

“We went through the whole Lido chorus line,” says Lamar. “Same thing at the 4 O’Clock Club. We’d have as many as thirty or thirty-five