Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [196]
“I want to ask you something and maybe you will do it,” he said. “I would like for you and your daughter to move to Graceland.”
“You’re kidding! Why?”
“Well, you said you want to be with her. I’d like to have her at Graceland.”
“She’s too young right now, Elvis.”
“That’s all right. I’m not going to do anything. I just want to raise her. I want her to be there as my wife.”
Mary Lou went home and told her husband. “Oh boy, he raised the roof! He went crazy! He started cursing and yellin’. I said, ‘That’s all right. I’m against it, too.’ ”
Sandy would end up dancing in a number of Elvis’s films (Viva Las Vegas; Easy Come, Easy Go; Double Trouble, and The Trouble with Girls), and go on dance auditions just so she could see him. She won the part in Viva Las Vegas on her own, with no help from him. “Elvis was quite surprised when he saw me on the set. During one of the scenes, he kept bumping my butt with his. He really got off on that.
“I was making $100, $150 a day. We would have lunch together.” A lot of days, she would get paid just for sitting there and eating with him. “What a great life for a young girl!”
Their romance lasted six years, up until the time he became engaged, she says. Mostly, they went to the movies or sat around and ate pizzas, since Elvis had early wake-up calls on the set. “We would kiss for hours, and dance for hours, and watch television, and sit at the piano and sing. We had an awful lot of fun.” But all through it, “There were no expectations on either of our parts.”
Still, Elvis had his rules. He sent her home for wearing a pants suit one night. (“Don’t ever wear pants again!”) And she was expected not to date anyone else, though he was free to do as he pleased. That caused a bit of friction. Once Sandy got a little older, she had a date with Wayne Newton, and Elvis saw it in the paper.
“He pulled this article out and said, ‘Who’s this Fig Newton person?’ He was really upset about that.” Later the two singers met, and one of them mentioned they were dating the same girl. “They came up with the idea to both stop dating me at the same time. It was going to be a joke, but neither one of them did. I continued to date both of them for a very long time.”
In 1975, Sandy married Wink Martindale, who Elvis had known for more than twenty years. Says Sandy, “I tell my husband he’s the best husband, but Elvis was the best kisser.”
While Elvis was getting to know Sandy, another fourteen-year-old was thinking of moving on. Elvis and Priscilla were talking on the phone, sometimes all night long, but he had taken three weeks to call her. Her mother had said, “Forget him, honey. It was a lovely chapter in your life, but it’s over.”
Priscilla apparently thought that way, too. She had already found someone in Weisbaden close to her own age who excited her. Elvis was not the bad boy renegade Priscilla thought he was from his music and movie roles, and that disappointed her. But as Suzanne Finstad wrote in Child Bride, sixteen-year-old Tommy Stewart, a sophomore at H. H. Arnold American Military High School, was the actual embodiment of that and reminded her of the boys she’d been involved with back at Del Valle. He had the look—the black leather jacket, the dark, slicked-back hair—and the intimidation factor. He smoked, he drank, he was a Golden Gloves champion, and “he was not afraid to let people know that he was a sort of dangerous guy,” his friend Tom Muldoon told Finstad.
Most of all, Tom Stewart was sexually active, and not just with girls at school. He was known to hang out in the rough part of town, on Meinzerstrasse, where prostitution was legal. And he was also known to disappear after school with Priscilla before she even met Elvis. After Elvis returned to the States, she began wearing Tom’s ring on a chain around her neck.
“She and Tom Stewart had a very physical affair,” says Finstad. “I found Tom after my book came out, and he confirmed