Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [179]
He asked her name, but out of nervousness—he already knew it. Currie had told him then, and Cliff had told him, and Lamar had even gone to check her out before Currie brought her to the house. “I told Elvis, ‘She’s as cute as she can be. But God Almighty, she’s fourteen years old! We’ll end up in prison for life!’ I watched that from the very beginning with abject fear.”
Gladys had always told Elvis to beware of a blue-eyed girl. But now that he had seen her, there was no turning back. Petite, demure, dark haired, with deep-set eyes, she so matched his ideal fantasy, as Finstad wrote, that it was as if he had designed her himself. Not only did she resemble Debra Paget, his unrequited love, but as with Debra, there was something about her face that matched his childhood memory of his mother when she was slim and vibrant. And, of course, at fourteen, she was almost certainly a virgin, another of Elvis’s aphrodisiacs. “She’s young enough that I can train her any way I want,” he later told Rex, practically bubbling over with enthusiasm.
According to her memoir, Priscilla’s account of that evening differs greatly from Currie’s recollection. After Currie introduced them, the airman stepped away, leaving them alone, and she and Elvis sat down to get acquainted. He asked her if she went to school, and when she said yes, he said, “What are you, about a junior or senior in high school?” She blushed, she wrote, and said nothing, not wanting to reveal how young she really was.
“Well?” he persisted.
“Ninth.”
Elvis looked baffled. “Ninth what?”
“Grade,” she whispered.
“Ninth grade,” he said and started laughing. “Why, you’re just a baby.”
She was miffed, and he could see it. “Well,” he said, “seems the little girl has spunk.” Then he gave her “that charming smile of his,” she wrote, “and all my resentment just melted away.”
They made small talk a little longer, and then he walked to the piano, playing “Rags to Riches,” “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” and “End of the Rainbow,” before launching into a hard-pounding Jerry Lee Lewis impersonation.
She didn’t applaud, she wrote, because she had noticed a life-size poster of a half-nude Brigitte Bardot on the wall, and “she was the last person I wanted to see, with her fulsome body, pouting lips, and wild mane of tousled hair.” It made her feel young and out of place.
But quickly, she noticed that Elvis vied for her attention, that the more disinterested she appeared, the harder he tried to impress her. He soon took her into the kitchen, where Grandma was frying up a pound of bacon, and Elvis devoured five bacon sandwiches, all slathered with mustard.
As he ate—Priscilla was too on edge to think about food—he pumped her for information about who the kids were listening to back home. “You,” she said, because she could see “he was nervous about losing his popularity.” They talked about Fabian and Ricky Nelson for a while, and then he asked her about herself.
“What kind of music do you like listening to?” he asked.
“I love Mario Lanza.”
“You’re kidding!” he said, both because he loved opera, and because Lanza was the uncle of Dolores Hart. “How do you know about Mario Lanza?”
Priscilla told him she adored his album The Student Prince.
“That’s my favorite,” Elvis told her, and they just seemed to click.
“He thought I had the taste of someone older than fourteen,” she says.
She could tell he missed his mother, missed Memphis, and was looking for a tie back to his fans in the States. And he seemed younger in his G.I. haircut.
“I found him extremely vulnerable and sweet. He had beautiful manners and an open heart. There was nothing false about him.”
All too soon, Currie came in and pointed to his watch. Couldn’t she stay a little while longer? Elvis asked. Priscilla didn’t take it as a sexual come-on, she said