Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [206]
“The two of us walked out onto the patio, and an immediate cheer went up from the crowd of people, mostly beautiful young women. No sooner had we gotten to the railing before a number of the young females began taking their bikini bathing suit tops off and waving them around in the air, while the ones wearing one-piece suits pulled their tops down, trying to catch his attention. Elvis immediately yelled, ‘Come on now, girls, don’t do that,’ which was quickly met by a resounding, ‘Keep doing it! Keep doing it!’ from Elvis’s guy friends. Elvis looked sheepishly at me and in an embarrassed tone, said, ‘That’s what the girls always do.’ ”
Darlene, who played one of the teenagers, had first run into him in the hallway of the hotel, where he said, “Hi, how are you?” in “a very soft, friendly voice.” She doesn’t remember what either of them said after that because, “I was so nervous and my legs were so wobbly I was afraid I was going to fall to the floor right there in front of him. I just remember thinking as we stood there chatting, ‘I can’t believe how beautiful he is, more so than in any picture I’ve ever seen of him.’ It was an experience I’ll never forget.”
Later, they expanded their friendship to kissing, though Elvis also became interested in Pamela Austin (then billed as Pamela Kirk), who played another of the students on tour with their teacher, and who would also appear in a later Elvis movie, Kissin’ Cousins.
His more intense love interest was his scripted girlfriend, Joan Blackman, who bore a slight resemblance to both his mother and to Priscilla, Joe Esposito thought. Joan understood the attraction: “He was always looking for someone with black hair and blue eyes, and I had that naturally.” She was cast in Blue Hawaii only eleven days before shooting, replacing Juliet Prowse, who made too many demands for Hal Wallis’s liking. The day she walked on the set, Joan says, Elvis approached her and said, “Man, you’re beautiful.” Joe counts their romance as one of Elvis’s “real relationships,” though it was brief.
“We had rooms next to each other in the hotel, and for weeks we just about lived together,” she has said. But she was serious about her work. “If it came to a toss-up between meeting Elvis for dinner or getting my sleep because of having to be on the set the next day, my work always won.” She also objected to the entourage: “It’s hard to talk with eight people at a time and really relate.”
Joan, who had competed in beauty contests as a young child and began singing and dancing professionally at age eleven, claims to have met Elvis at Paramount in 1957 and dated him for a year before he went into the army.
“There was something between us . . . he had really liked me [when I knew him before], and some of that rekindled on the set. Had I not been dating someone else at the time we filmed, things could have gotten serious between us.”
Blue Hawaii, for all its lush tropical settings and sentimental romance, was not a particularly fun movie to shoot, Joan says, as Hal Wallis “was not the kind of person that you had a good time with. Our sets were very serious. . . . In certain dialogue scenes Elvis was very nervous. He used to hold my hand until I thought he’d never let me go.”
To break up the tension, whenever something went wrong on the set, particularly if one of the guys accidentally ruined a take, Elvis would cup his hands around his mouth and mimic a loudspeaker: “Flight 247, now leaving from Honolulu to Memphis, with Charlie Hodge on board.”
“He needed to do stuff like that because he was not at ease in front of the camera,” in Joan’s estimation.
On the other hand, Joan thought that Elvis was too passive. He rarely asked to change dialogue that he found difficult. And unlike in his prearmy films, he usually accepted direction he didn’t agree with rather than question it.
“It takes a lot of courage to take a chance and fight for it, to say, ‘I want this.’ I don