Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [188]
Yours alone,
EP
In challenging Anita to “keep our word” about growing to care for someone else, Elvis breaks his word in not being truthful with her about Priscilla.
Anita had read about her in the papers, and “he assured me that this was a child, a fourteen-year-old child.” While she considered this letter from Elvis to be “a little cruel,” she says, “I had been a little cruel to him.”
If he really thought that Anita might leave him, it would have been a grave concern, particularly now that he was returning to Graceland for the first time since his mother’s death. His letter suggests that his real intention in writing was to secure Anita as a backup—that he was making certain he had, literally, a warm body awaiting his return from frozen, frosty Deutschland.
Elvis’s psychological set would have mandated a backup, in case he had trouble with Captain Beaulieu, for his relationship with Priscilla had to feel tenuous, given her age and the fact that she would remain in Germany when he went home. If Priscilla were the new obsession, “Anita was a known entity, comfort food for the mind, a distant, parsed-off reality that in Elvis’s mind smelled, felt, reeked of home, Gladys, Memphis, and stardom,” says psychologist Whitmer. “Whatever carnality the two of them had enjoyed, that, too, would be exponentially magnified.”
Elvis’s reference to two years being “a long time in a young girl’s life” may also have been his subconscious—and accurate—assessment of the time it would take to get Priscilla to Memphis. Yet given the malleable mind of a fourteen-year-old, Elvis must have sensed that he was in the catbird seat in being able to mold her during those years, even from afar.
That Christmas, he arranged for a French poodle to be delivered to Anita, while at a party at Goethestrasse for his family and friends, he had Priscilla sit next to him at the piano as he sang “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” She was furious with him—when he started to switch to guitar, he nonchalantly asked two English girls where his pick was. One of them told him its precise location: “It’s upstairs on the table right beside your bed,” she answered, smiling. “I’ll get it.”
Priscilla, who’d given Elvis a pair of bongo drums for Christmas, knew he had betrayed her once more. But he denied it, explaining that he’d mentioned how unkempt his bedroom was, and the girl had merely offered to clean it for him. Priscilla didn’t believe him, but now, at the piano, “when he leaned over and gently kissed me, when he told me I was the one, the only one, when I saw tears in his eyes, nothing in the world mattered but our love. Nothing mattered but him.”
When Elvis returned from winter maneuvers, he contacted a South African doctor named Laurenz Johannes Griessel Landau, who advertised herbal skin treatments to reduce acne scars and enlarged pores. Elvis, who “had pores big enough to hide a tank in,” as Lamar put it, fretted about how he looked in his close-ups on screen, and began weekly treatments with the doctor. But their association came to an end when the dermatologist—who turned out not to have a medical degree at all—made inappropriate advances to Elvis during a procedure. “He eased his hand down between Elvis’s legs and gave him a good squeeze,” Lamar remembers. “And, boy, Elvis jumped thirty feet up in the air.”
Elvis told him to get out, that his work was finished. But Landau was not so easily dismissed. He had tape recordings and pictures of Elvis and “a young, young girl” in intimate situations, he said, and he threatened to expose them. Panicked, Elvis gave Landau enough money to relocate to London. Then