Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [194]
Juliet was not his usual physical type—the South African dancer-actress was just under six feet tall, and she originally snubbed him on the set. (“Man, I’ll tell you, that is one cold chick,” Elvis remarked to Sonny West.) But part of her appeal lay in the fact that she was the girlfriend of Frank Sinatra, who had just devoted his Timex special to spotlighting Elvis’s return from the army, the two trading songs (Elvis sang “Witchcraft,” Frank sang “Love Me Tender”) in a generational détente.
Just like his character in the film, Elvis was determined to win Juliet over, and carried their love scenes far beyond director Norman Taurog’s cries of “cut.” After a while, Taurog called him over. “You don’t have to put your heart and soul into it,” he said. “How can you help but put your heart and soul into this?” Elvis answered, defrosting the ice queen. “A few days being around him, she just wore right down,” says Sonny. “She started cutting up with us.”
Soon he and Juliet began spending time in his portable dressing room. Red and Sonny teased him, repeatedly knocking on the trailer door and saying, “Frank’s coming, Elvis!”
“Elvis would open that door and say, ‘Where is he?’, and we would just run off laughing,” says Sonny. Then one day Sinatra showed up for real. Red went over to that door and whispered, “Elvis, Elvis, here comes Frank, man! I promise you.”
“Get away from that door, Red.”
“I mean it. I can’t talk too loud or he will hear, man. I can’t say any more.”
“Frank came up and introduced himself, very nice,” Sonny remembers. “He said, ‘Hi. Is Elvis in?’ And we said, ‘Yes, sir, he’s going over his dialogue.’ Frank knocked on the door, and thankfully Elvis had heard his voice, so when he opened it, Juliet was sitting there prim and proper with her script, and Elvis had his script in his hand like they were going over lines. He said, ‘Well, hey Frank!’ And Juliet said, ‘Hi, darling!’ Everything was fine, and she left and went to lunch with him. Afterward, Elvis said, ‘You sons of guns, you almost cost me there!’ ”
Their lovemaking was fierce and intense. “He said Juliet liked to grab her ankles and spread her legs real wide,” reports Lamar. And Juliet would sit on the floor at friends’ houses and just hug herself, she was so smitten with him. (“He’s really one of the most sincere people in the most insincere town on earth,” she said.) But Elvis dropped her after a few dressing room encounters—not because she was Frank’s girl, but because he saw her as smarter and more sophisticated than he, which made him uncomfortable.
Their friendship, however, remained, and she played it cool in interviews: “He had a wonderful sense of humor . . . I remember thinking at the time it must be very hard to be him. . . . He had a suite up at the Beverly Wilshire and he couldn’t leave because the place would be surrounded by girls.”
According to Byron Raphael, around this same time, Elvis had a momentary brush with a far more intimidating Hollywood star, Marilyn Monroe. Lamar, of all people, had already chatted up the screen goddess at a party. But Elvis had never seen her. Then in the early summer of 1960, the two most explosive and legendary sex symbols of their era sized each other up in the street in front of a soundstage at Twentieth Century-Fox and came away unnerved, if not befuddled.
Marilyn, who was reeling both from her fractious marriage to celebrated playwright Arthur Miller and from her affair with actor-singer Yves Montand, was costarring with the latter in Let’s Make Love, then in production at Fox. Elvis was due to start principal photography on the period western Flaming Star there in August, and two months earlier, reported to the studio for wardrobe.
Byron said he was with Elvis, Cliff, and Gene (who now hoped to pursue a movie career under the name “El Gino Stone”) when the guys began goading him. They were sitting in Elvis’s dressing room on the lot. “Man, you gotta meet Marilyn Monroe,” Gene started. “Elvis, you’ve got to ask Marilyn out!”
“No,” he said, seeing Marilyn in a league of her own. “She