Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [200]
Wild in the Country, with four songs, most of them inserted in odd places, fell short of box office expectations. Director Dunne praised Elvis as “an excellent dramatic actor, a natural actor,” but lambasted the Colonel for ruining the film with musical numbers. “I shot them so they could be dropped out, and I wish they would drop them out of the prints now. People would see a good movie.” In preview, the audience, caught up in the story, laughed whenever Elvis started to sing. Author Salamanca called it “a terrible film.”
Elvis was terrifically depressed and deflated, even during shooting, and knew deep down that the picture would seal the coffin on his hopes to become a serious actor. His resentment toward Parker and the studio heads fueled his drug use and brought dark and brooding changes to his personality. He pulled a four-shot Derringer on a group of kids who mouthed off at him in traffic in San Francisco on a weekend trip, and soon he would display other aberrant behavior. Joe and Lamar started calling him by a new nickname, “Crazy.”
Later that year, Barbara Hearn got a call from someone in Elvis’s inner circle, asking if she would come out to Graceland. Barbara hadn’t seen Elvis since Gladys’s death, and when she arrived, he was sitting around downstairs with his new pack of friends. She was saddened at their interaction: “Whatever he would say, everybody would agree with him.”
They were talking about his next picture, Blue Hawaii, which would be choreographed by Charles O’Curran, the husband of singer Patti Page.
As Barbara remembers it, “Elvis said, ‘Patti Page is the best female singer,’ and everybody said yes, she was the best female singer. Then he looked at me and grinned, and I said, ‘No.’ And he laughed and he said, ‘Well, you can count on Barbara to disagree with everybody. Who do you think is the greatest female singer?’ I said, ‘I like Peggy Lee better than anybody else.’ I thought she was a much better musician. She wrote great songs, and I just liked her style. So we had a big discussion about Peggy Lee versus Patti Page. But in a few minutes, it was back to the same old thing, so I went upstairs and called Mother and asked if she would come get me.”
Elvis followed her up as she was hanging up the phone.
“Why are you leaving?”
“Well, honestly, I’m just not having a good time.”
His face fell, and then he said, “Neither am I.”
But it was his house, she told him. “You can do something about it.”
“We talked until Mother came, and she was very touched because he just hugged and hugged her, and kissed her on the cheek. Later, she said, ‘I think he knew that was the last time we would ever see each other.’ And I said, ‘I think he did, too.’ ”
It would be another sixteen years before Barbara would see him, and then only onstage. When she left Graceland that day, she cordoned off a part of her life.
If Elvis had just lost a vital female connection, he made another through a chance encounter. In the fall of 1960, the man who had been out of the housing projects only seven years bought a black Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud II. He was driving down Santa Monica Boulevard one night and caught the eye of seventeen-year-old Patti Parry, who was on her way to a fraternity party with a girlfriend. That one minute in time changed her life.
“Let’s go see who’s in that Rolls-Royce,” she said to her friend and pulled her old clunker of a Buick next to him at a red light. Patti, who was going to beauty school, had been born in the Stamford Hill section of London, England, but she’d been in the States since she was ten, and she knew the drill in L.A. “It’s Elvis Presley,” she said. “Pretend we don’t know who he is.”
He rolled down the window.
“Hey, girls. Hi!”
Patti played it cool.
“You look familiar,” she deadpanned. “Do I know you from somewhere?”
Elvis laughed and said, “Pull over!”
He knew she knew who he was, and he liked being noticed—liked the looks on people’s faces when they saw him out in public.
They chatted for a few minutes—he was on his way to Radio Recorders to do the title