Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [193]
The night before Rex and Elisabeth ran off, Rex went to Elvis and told him he’d thought about what it would be like to work for him, but he was going to go back to his old job. Elvis said he understood and wished him luck.
He had rented out the Memphian that night, and Rex was helping him get ready. “Elvis was looking into the big walled mirror at himself,” Rex wrote in his memoir. “I was directly behind him, helping him with his tuxedo suspenders.”
“Elvis,” he said, “would you mind if I took Elisabeth out on a date tonight?”
For a minute, Elvis said nothing. Rex held his breath. “Clearly a nerve had been struck,” Rex wrote.
“Rexadus, you know Elisabeth will never love anybody but me,” Elvis said, his voice steely. Then he switched gears. “Heck, I’m glad you’re taking her out. I know I can count on you to treat her like a lady.”
That summer, they sent him an invitation to their wedding. But he didn’t come, and they never saw him again.
It was a confusing time for Elvis. He was home, but home wasn’t really home anymore. His mother was gone. He had driven out to see the marker and the big stone angels on her grave the day after he got back to Memphis, and he placed a standing order with Burke’s Florist to deliver fresh flowers there once a week. But he found it hard to return to the cemetery himself. It was just too painful. “He didn’t seem like Elvis ever again,” his Aunt Lillian observed. “He was depressed. He’d say, ‘I can’t go to the cemetery, Aunt Lillian. I can’t hardly pass there.’ ”
To make things worse, Vernon was converting the three-car garage into an apartment for himself and Dee and her boys. Elvis and Anita were out by the swimming pool the day Vernon moved Dee in. “Daddy,” Anita remembers Elvis saying, “are you sure you want to do this? Why do you want to do this?”
Anita felt for Elvis. It was hard to watch him struggle with the idea of another woman occupying the house he had bought for Gladys. “Eventually, the two of them moved into Mr. and Mrs. Presley’s old bedroom. That wasn’t very good, either. Elvis didn’t like that a bit.”
When Vernon and Dee married in Alabama that July, Elvis was noticeably absent. “She seems pretty nice,” Elvis told the Memphis Press-Scimitar. “I only had one mother and that’s it. There’ll never be another. As long as she understands that, we won’t have any trouble.”
In April, Elvis and his entourage, which now included new members Joe Esposito, Charlie Hodge, and Red West’s younger cousin, Sonny, headed for California to make G.I. Blues for Paramount. Producer Hal Wallis had visited his star in Germany to soak up the ambience for Elvis’s first musical comedy, in which he would play a romanticized version of himself. As Tulsa McLean, a singing army specialist stationed in West Germany, Elvis accepts a bet that he can romance a chilly cabaret dancer, Lili, played by the well-cast Juliet Prowse.
Unlike his prearmy films, which were based on previously published novels or stories, G.I. Blues was written for the screen and follows a predictable and formulaic storyline. Elvis makes the best of the tepid script, in which he babysits an infant and sings at a children’s puppet show. But the film telegraphs only ominous things about his future screen persona. Gone are the swiveling hips, the sideburns, the songs of sexual undertow, and Elvis the rebel. In his place is a clean-cut, harmless, and conservative Elvis, designed to appeal to middle America. G.I. Blues would serve as the prototype for all the Presley musicals to come. From here on out, the public Elvis would become much more what people thought he should be.
Offscreen, he was not nearly so neutered, as he pursued three actresses on the film, Juliet Prowse, Leticia Roman, and a bit player, Judy Rawlins. He had more success with Juliet and Judy, the Italian-born Leticia, nineteen, telling the press, “He kept asking me to go out with him, but I tell him, ‘No. I don’t think it would be a good idea. It would seem too much like a publicity date.’ Besides, I don’t think my parents would