Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [176]
One late afternoon the stage manager of the Lido called the hotel three times. Lamar answered, half-asleep.
“We’re ready to begin the first show,” the stage manager said.
“Go ahead and start,” Lamar told him, and then hung up.
Shortly after, the phone rang again.
“We need to start the show!”
Lamar hung up.
A third call, frantic now: “The show is starting!”
“Well, start the damned show!” Lamar said.
“But you don’t understand, monsieur! You have all our Bluebell Girls!”
Lamar looked around and realized he was right. Not only were all the Bluebell Girls in the suite, but they were also still asleep. Now, like a determined den mother, Lamar rounded up the guests and called downstairs for four limousines. Suddenly the girls were a whirlwind of high heels and ostrich feathers, hopping down the hallway with one shoe on and trying to zip up their costumes.
While in Paris, Elvis became especially enamored of dancer Jane Clarke, a Brit, and Nancy Parker, a red-haired American ice skater at the Lido whom he would later see in Las Vegas. But his one disappointment was never meeting Brigitte Bardot. According to Rex Mansfield, he managed to get her phone number and left several messages. But she never called back—she was out of the country making a movie. “Nevertheless, Elvis felt snubbed, as though she should have been there for him,” Rex wrote in his memoir. “ ‘To hell with that bitch!’ he said in frustration.”
The sheer volume of women with whom Elvis had some kind of relationship, whether sexual or emotional, now bordered on the pathological.
Waiting for him at home in Bad Nauheim, for example, was twenty-three-year-old Ingrid Sauer, a blond telephone operator who came to his parties and brought her friends. She also posed for tabloid photographers in only a towel and gave interviews as Elvis’s girlfriend. (“His hobby is to see how many times he can get a pellet from an air pistol through the center hole of a gramophone record at five or ten yards,” she reported.)
But though Ingrid was only a year younger than the twenty-four-year-old Elvis, she was too old for his tastes at the time. “In Germany, Elvis was fascinated with the idea of real young teenage girls, which scared the crap out of all of us,” Lamar says. One was fifteen-year-old Heli Priemel, a dancer Elvis nicknamed “Legs.”
And perhaps another was fifteen-year-old Siegrid Schutz, an English-speaking German fan who spent practically every day of her three-week summer vacation outside Elvis’s house. Though he had hung a sign out front that read AUTOGRAPHS 7:30–8 P.M., she frequently rang the doorbell and asked to see him.
Some of the gate watchers, including USO hostess Sue Anderson, got invited in for more than an autograph. Siegrid, however, sometimes got a scolding, since she and a friend would sit waiting in one of Elvis’s cars. Eventually he took the zealous fan and her girlfriend to a party at the house of soldier Rex Harrison.
After that, Siegrid saw Elvis often. She went with him and the gang to play football and was photographed with him more than any other German girl, both that summer and again in January 1960. She has been described as one of Elvis’s secret loves, perhaps because she kept her dozens of photographs private for more than thirty years.
However, none of the pictures was taken inside the house, which suggests she was not as intimate with him as some people think. And in the pictures of them together, Elvis looks mostly put upon, as if she has worried him to death.
Elvis showed considerably more interest in another teenage girl he would meet that September.
Sergeant Presley helps fourteen-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu into Currie Grant’s car, March 2, 1960, as he leaves his rented home for the air base to return to the States. Life magazine would write about their involvement, calling her “The Girl He Left Behind.” Of her childhood, Priscilla has said, “I always knew something extraordinary was going to happen to me.”