Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [208]
In many ways, her character mirrored Elvis’s fantasies about Sandy Ferra and Priscilla Beaulieu. As Holly Jones, Anne played a live-in orphan who grows up under Elvis’s protective eye, maturing from a scrawny teen to a young woman. “You know anything about sex, Holly?” his character asks.
“I really fell for Elvis, I mean, who wouldn’t? We did have a romance, and it was quite wonderful.” She wrote poetry about him during the day, and at night, they went for drives in his Cadillac, flying through silhouetted palms and scrub oak along State Road 40, Elvis fiddling with the radio dial.
“It was so strange when ‘Hound Dog’ would come on, and there I was, sitting next to him.” The evenings usually ended up with more than a romantic drive, though. “He really liked sex. A lot of nights I didn’t go back to my own bungalow. I felt a little ashamed about it the next morning, because I knew that the people on the set realized what was going on.” At the same time, “I had fun. And it was special.”
Though she had been a showgirl at New York’s Copacabana nightclub, she hadn’t realized the extent of Elvis’s fame until she accompanied him to Weeki Wachee Springs, Florida, on July 30, 1961, for a special ceremony honoring his achievements. There, the Colonel, reliving his Florida carnival days, arranged for a mermaid show of what the ol’ hustler dubbed the Elvis Presley Underwater Fan Club.
Thousands of people showed up, “and they were behind a wire fence to keep them away from him, because they were crazed,” Helm remembers. “I was really overwhelmed by it, because I’d never seen such madness for someone.” She was equally surprised that Elvis stayed and signed autographs for several hours. “I was so touched by that. He really revered his fans. He was lovely with them.” They brought out all “the sweetness and cream in him,” she thought, watching him walk along the fence, talking with people.
She continued to see him when they returned to California, but she found it more difficult to date him there, where he no longer knocked on her door and brought her flowers, and where his parties consisted of carpet-to-carpet women, mostly young girls. One night at the piano, he said something to her that angered her, and she pulled the piano lid down on his hands. It hurt his finger, and “He was really mad, for the first time, at me.” She apologized, but it didn’t seem to help, and the next day, she went out and bought a gag gift, a big rubber thumb, and sent it to him with a note. Still, “I never heard from him again.”
She knew to give up and to cherish what now seemed like a shipboard romance in Florida. In California, “He had many lives, he had many women around him. It wasn’t like Crystal River, where I had him all to myself every night.”
But that was only because Elvis had become frightened of Joanna Moore. According to Joe Esposito, her reputation for promiscuity preceded her on the Follow That Dream set, and “sure enough, they went off together.” The affair was short-lived, however, because Elvis found her strange and emotionally fragile. She spoke in a voice that was both high-pitched and tense, and she was far too effusive with both the guys and with Elvis, declaring her love for him almost immediately. When she became clingy, he quickly moved on to Anne.
However, when filming resumed in California, Joanna was not to be ignored. She showed up at Elvis’s door late one night, looking terrible, “as if she’d just climbed out of bed,” Joe remembered. Slurring her words, she demanded to see Elvis. When Joe told her Elvis was asleep, she began crying and tried to force her way into the house. She passed out in Joe’s and Charlie’s arms, and after Charlie got a wet cloth and revived her, Joe asked her what could be so important that couldn’t wait until morning.
“Elvis got me pregnant,” she moaned. “And I took a bunch of sleeping pills. I have to talk to him!”
Charlie and Joe