Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [189]
It never occurred to Elvis to end his inappropriate relationship with Priscilla, however, nor to curtail his activities with the dancers and strippers at the clubs. In early January 1960, just after his twenty-fifth birthday, he returned to Paris for six days with Cliff, Lamar, and Joe, acting as his new friend’s tour guide in the romantic city. Joe, at Vernon’s request, would keep tabs on the expenditures, a job he would do well, impressing not only Vernon and Elvis, but also their accountant back in Memphis.
“We just played all night and slept during the day,” Joe remembers. (“Well, I’ll tell you, it’s a gay town . . . if you like nightlife and everything,” Elvis would soon remark to Armed Forces Radio.) They stayed in the penthouse at the George V Hotel and hit all of Elvis’s usual nightspots, taking in the drag show at Le Bantu. Elvis had enjoyed an encounter with a female contortionist in Frankfurt one night (“He stayed in that dressing room five or six hours—came out of there wringing wet,” Lamar says), but he kept his distance from the impersonators. Lamar and Cliff had already gotten burned, and he didn’t want to be next.
Elvis had a more legitimate reason for going to Paris—to further his new study of karate. (“It gave him permission to be a badass,” says Lamar.) For the last month, he had been taking lessons twice a week from Jurgen Seydel, the father of German karate. Elvis had been fascinated by martial arts since 1957, when Tura Satana mentioned their influence on her strip act and showed him some of the moves. Only recently, he had read a magazine article about Hank Slamansky, the ex-marine who introduced the sport into the armed services. Seydel saw how serious Elvis was about it and recommended that he take classes from the Japanese instructor Tetsuji Murakami in Paris.
Within days of returning to Germany, he was promoted to acting sergeant, and after another round of maneuvers, he threw a party to celebrate his forthcoming transfer. His army experience was finally coming to an end. On March 3, 1960, he would be on his way home, flying into Fort Dix, New Jersey. “They thought I couldn’t take it, and I was determined to go to any limits to prove otherwise,” he told Armed Forces Radio.
Now he began making real plans to resume his old life in the States. Joe Esposito would go to work for him when they got home, and Elisabeth had agreed to come to Graceland to be his secretary, with occasional trips to Hollywood. Elvis hoped Rex Mansfield would also join the group as his road manager, and he would talk with him about it on the train heading home to Memphis. They had walked every step of their army hitch together, from the first day to the last.
Looking back on it all, he defined his time in the service as a blessing in disguise. “It was a time of grief for me. . . . It came at a time when I sorely needed a change. God’s hand at work. The army took me away from myself and gave me something different.”
On March 1, the day before his departure, the military held a press conference for its celebrity sergeant. More than one hundred reporters and photographers attended, capturing Elvis’s every word and gesture as his commanding officer presented him with a certificate of merit for “cheerfulness and drive and continually outstanding leadership ability.”
Nobody but Joe Esposito knew that at that very moment, Elvis had 1,200 pills packed in his luggage, “a box of twelve bottles with a hundred pills in each one.” In Paris, “We’d be out partying all night, then get up and take one of those little pills, and it was great. Elvis was the type who thought you never take just one, because two is even better.”
Before he left the press conference that day, Elvis ran into an old friend, someone he hadn’t seen since her enlistment in 1957. He hadn’t even known she was in Germany. It was Marion Keisker, his mentor from Sun Records, who still insisted that she, and not Sam Phillips, had really discovered