Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [187]
After each visit, Currie, or Lamar, or Joe would drive Priscilla home. In dreadful weather, the forty-five-minute drive would take far longer, and they would sometimes get her home at two or three in the morning, far after her curfew. Instead of a dressing-down, however, they received only pleasantries from her parents. Priscilla could hardly get up for school the next morning, but all her mother would say, Currie told Finstad, was, “What time do you want her ready the next time?”
Priscilla was right to worry about Anita Wood. Late that fall, while out on winter maneuvers in Bavaria’s Wildflecken, where he spent thirty days sleeping out on the ground, often in snow, Elvis wrote Anita a four-page letter. Postmarked November 6, 1959, it was the last of three letters Elvis wrote her during his military service, and it was by far the most revealing, as he rolled out in frank terms his homesickness, mother need, and hormonal desire.
He addressed her as “My Dearest Darling ‘Little,’ ” and began by saying how miserable he was out in the field. He was down with a fever and tonsillitis again, he wrote, and listening to the radio. His only consolation was that his tour of duty was almost over, and he would soon come home to his career, friends, and “most of all you, my darling.”
His reason for writing, he told her in well-thought-out paragraphs, was that he was worried about how she might react when he did return home. He didn’t know how she felt about him now, he said, “because after all, two years is a long time in a young girl’s life.”
It was a curious choice of words, considering that Anita would turn twenty-one in May, and was nearly a woman, while fourteen-year-old Priscilla was clearly a child. His words suggest that he was melding them emotionally in his mind. But on the surface, he seems concerned that Anita may have gotten older and wiser, and that she might have moved on.
Whether Elvis wrote the letter as much to make up his own mind between his two loves, he spent the majority of it declaring his love for Anita and apologizing for things she might have read or heard. He also said that he had the feeling she had cooled on him, not only because she hadn’t written to him, but also because of the sound of her voice on the phone. “The warmth and love seems to have dimmed,” he said.
I want you to know that in spite of our being apart, I have developed a love for you that cannot be equaled or surpassed by anyone. My every thought is you, my darling. Every song I hear, every sunset reminds me of the happy and wonderful times we’ve spent together. I tell you this because I want you to know my feelings toward you have not changed, but instead has [sic] grown stronger than I ever thought it [sic] could.
I have hurt you sometimes because I was mad at some of the things you did, or I thought you did, but every time these things happened, I thought that maybe you only liked me for what I am, and didn’t really love me for myself. . . . The fact remains, if it’s really love, Anita, if we really love each other, it will last . . . although things will come up in the future that will hurt us both. They are to be expected.
Please believe me when I tell you it’s you and only you, my darling. But I think that you will keep our word, and tell me if you had grown to care for someone else and vice versa . . . Darling, I pray that you haven’t let your loneliness, passions, and desires make you do something that would hurt me. If you have, it is better you tell me now. I can’t believe you have or would.
So darling, if you still feel the same and if you love me and me alone, we will have