Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [209]
“Make sure you call and find out how she’s doing today,” he said. “I knew that girl had problems. That’s why I stopped seeing her.”
As for the pregnancy, Joe says, the doctors saw no evidence of it.
On his next picture, Kid Galahad, a remake of the 1937 boxer film of the same title, Elvis was once more romantically paired with Joan Blackman. He had requested her on the film, but by the time it went into production, he was also involved with twenty-three-year-old Connie Stevens, who he’d seen in the Hawaiian Eye television series. As soon as he asked her out, “I knew,” she says, “this was a fellow who could break your heart.” Still, she couldn’t resist him: “He was just so beautiful. He had mischievous eyes that darted around the room.”
She saw him on and off for two years. “I really cared about him. I cared what happened to his life.” And so she worked on him to find a way to live a more normal existence, to not be so isolated and such a prisoner of fame. He no longer walked around with a wallet. (“Elvis never carried a dime in his pocket, no matter where he went,” says Joe.) And when it came to women, it was as if he had forgotten how to date. As for being mobbed, once he got past the gate girls, who waited all day and night for him to come out, surely he could just go to dinner and a movie in the film star capital of the world, couldn’t he?
“He finally listened to me long enough, and we went to Grauman’s Chinese [Theatre], and I thought, ‘I’ll never put this guy through this again.’ I remember Joe put money in his pocket, and he was nervous as hell. And we went out in the car, and he wore his favorite cap, and we ran out of gas. He was just panic-stricken. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll push this car.’ ”
They managed to get the car into a gas station, but as he had done in Germany, he missed the beginning of the picture, because he was afraid too many people would recognize him going in, and he missed the end of the picture, so they could get out without being bothered.
“Sure enough, we got out into the car and we were going home, laughing about the whole night, and he went to reach for his favorite cap, and it was gone. That was so typical, people wanting a piece of him all of the time.”
Connie wanted something too, of course: She wanted a part of Elvis’s heart. “But one of the things I knew instinctively was that he probably couldn’t be captured, and shouldn’t be captured, because he was so special that he needed to be in the world. He was a very dear, precious person.”
Of all the men she dated—she would later marry Eddie Fisher—Elvis was her father’s favorite. “He was one of the loves of my life,” she admits. “I could have spent a lifetime with him. And I knew it was never to be.” Not only were the other women a problem, she says, but to be with him, “you had to follow the crowd.” Like Joan Blackman, “I got tired of going out with eleven guys for dinner.”
By spring 1962 the entourage included Joe, Gene, Lamar, Alan, Billy, and Ray “Chief” Sitton. Sonny, Red, and Charlie were still part of the Mafia, though they all sought independent work, Sonny and Red in Hollywood, and Charlie with country singer Jimmy Wakely. Cliff would continue to be hired and fired with regularity, and Lamar would soon be gone, though only temporarily, after a blowup with Elvis.
Patti still worked her hairdressing job, but she went wherever Elvis was three days a week and remained a fixture at the house whenever he was in California. And Marty Lacker, who had first started coming up to Graceland in 1957 but had just now officially joined the group, would weave in and out in the early 1960s. Marty would quickly develop a fondness for pills, mostly downers to round off the high ends of his intensity.
Elvis now began traveling cross-country in a 1962 Dodge motor home, replete with double bed, two bunks, a kitchen, and air-conditioning. He paid in excess of $10,000 for it and planned to have George Barris, “Customizer to