Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [199]
Lange had never seen Elvis before, except on television, where “I wasn’t that impressed. I thought he was kind of a greaseball. [But] I was surprised. We had a wonderful time. We were always cracking up.”
Hope was a classy, Connecticut-born lady, but if Elvis feared she’d be too stuffy, she squelched that notion immediately, and he invited her to the house several times for pizza. While her marriage to actor Don Murray was failing—their divorce would be final the following year—Elvis made no moves on her, treating her only with respect. She, in turn, found him charming. According to Alan Fortas, she teased him about having no liquor in the house, which made him stock the bar on Perugia Way and on location in Napa Valley, California. She also got him drinking screwdrivers. When Elvis developed a boil on his rear end (“It hurt so much he couldn’t sit down—he had to just kind of lean on his hip, or lay in a chair,” Alan recalled), the studio sent a doctor to the motel to lance it.
“What’s the problem?” Hope asked, coming to the room where Elvis was in bed.
“I got a boil on my ass,” he said, trying to mask his embarrassment.
“Let me see,” she teased and yanked back the sheets. Alan, Gene, and Joe exploded with laughter, and Elvis turned as red as his boil. His posterior healed, but Elvis’s pride remained wounded. Every few days, Hope would saunter over to him and whisper, “How’s your ass?”
On location, Elvis secluded himself with blond wardrobe girl Nancy Sharp, whom he’d met on Flaming Star, but the Ivy Leaguer was a little too proper for him. He was more interested in Tuesday Weld, who looked a bit like a blond Priscilla. Although known for precocious, sex kitten roles, Tuesday was as brilliant as she was volatile. At her father’s early death, she became a child model and the family breadwinner, but it proved to be too much. At nine, she had a nervous breakdown, and she began drinking heavily at ten. Two years later, she tried to commit suicide after falling in love with a homosexual. She was seventeen at the time she filmed Wild in the Country.
Alan Fortas, who had a crush on her, remembered her as being “sweet” to everyone in Elvis’s camp. But Joe Esposito recalls her salty language and recklessness. Before Elvis moved from the Beverly Wilshire, “She decided to chuck a quart of milk out the window of our top-floor suite” just to see it splatter, and got in a shouting match with hotel security when they failed to recognize her. Tuesday also liked to throw things at people from Elvis’s moving car.
Their romance was apparently hot—Tuesday called him “dynamite, real dynamite”—but harried. “She thought Elvis was very emotionally immature,” says Kevin Eggers, a friend from the early days in Hollywood. “He lost his temper and physically came at her one day, and she just looked back at him and said, ‘You make the mistake of touching me and I’ll put you in the hospital.’ She had a great, funny line about him. She said, ‘You know, Elvis looked better with his clothes on.’ But the simple fact was that one was a bright, talented young woman, and one was a bright, highly talented boy–man. He was never comfortable with a woman. He didn’t have lovers. He had playmates. Once Elvis realized the girl had a mind of her own, it was over. Tuesday had the nerve to talk back.”
That was part of Elvis’s problem with Christina Crawford—the adopted daughter of screen legend Joan Crawford—who had a small part in the picture. Joe brought her to the house one night, and when he sprung from his seat to light Elvis’s cigar, she knocked it out of his mouth.
“He shouldn’t have to light your cigar,” Christina huffed.
“I don’t mind,” Joe said.
But Elvis, living on amphetamines and pain pills, was incensed and “pulled her by the hair across the coffee table, and ordered her to