Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [210]
And there were other changes. At the end of 1961, Elvis decided he’d outgrown the Perugia Way house—neighbors complained that the girls out front made the place look like a male bordello—and moved to another rental property, an elegant Italian villa just around the corner at 10539 Bellagio Road. The mansion was “very grand,” says Joe, and came with a butler.
They had been there only a few days, according to Alan Fortas, when Elvis mourned the fact that he hadn’t brought along the source of much of his fun on Perugia Way—a two-way mirror, which he used to spy on the guys and their dates in the den. It was small, maybe three feet by two feet, but it fed Elvis’s growing interest in voyeurism, and the guys loved it, too, even if the women didn’t. Tuesday Weld came over one time and looked through it and called them all a bunch of adolescents.
On Bellagio Road, Sonny got the idea to install a new mirror in the cabana, where female guests changed from their street clothes into their bathing suits. It was huge—the size of a picture window, five by five—but it worked only at the back of the cabana, which meant the guys had to crawl under the house to see anything. The first time girls came over for a swim, Alan was surprised to see Elvis with dirt on his cheeks and a big smear across his forehead.
“I can’t believe you crawled under there. Hell, Elvis, they’ll let you look!”
Elvis thought about it for a second. “Yeah,” he said, “but it’s a lot more fun this way.”
The Bellagio Road home was the scene of many memorable parties, particularly as Elvis had recently acquired a forty-pound chimpanzee named Scatter, the retired star of a children’s TV show in Memphis. He was a perfect party animal, since he naturally gravitated toward women, sticking his head up girls’ skirts, unbuttoning their blouses, and hiding behind the bathroom door to scare the wits out of them.
The first time Patti Parry came over after Elvis brought Scatter out to California, he came in the room screeching, with his hands up, every hair standing on end, and Patti thought he was going to attack her. Scatter only wanted to look up her skirt, but when she told him to stop and he didn’t, she said, “You do that one more time, and I’m going to knock the hell out of you.”
“Naturally, he did it again,” Billy Smith says, and Patti hit him under the chin, and he did a back flip and landed on the couch, dazed. “He looked at her like he couldn’t believe it,” in Billy’s description. “Scatter had a head like a bowling ball, but she put a dent in it.”
Alan and Sonny found his antics hilarious. Sometimes they sent him into a bedroom where a couple was making love, and Scatter would get excited and jump on the guy’s back. Elvis thought it was funny, though he was embarrassed when the chimp would masturbate in front of his female guests. (“Believe it or not, we did not teach him to do that,” says Marty Lacker.) But it fascinated Elvis, who was becoming more and more interested in all things sexual. Soon he would ask Alan to have soft porn films made for him, often of two girls wrestling in white cotton panties. It was a flashback, of sorts, to his childhood turn-on—seeing his two aunts dancing together and waving their skirts up in the air.
Patti says it’s important to remember the context of such things. “Listen, you gotta realize,” she says. “Nineteen-year-old truck driver overnight becomes superstar and super stud, which he wasn’t.”
Scatter’s days were numbered, especially when he became destructive. He tore up the drapes in hotel rooms, punched a hole in Elvis’s 35 mm projection screen, and bit the hired help. One evening, he got out and ruined a neighbor’s fancy cocktail party, the guests jumping up on the tables and the backs of couches as he roared through the house screaming “Whoo-whoo-whoo!”
Alan usually took care of him, but because he had no one specific master, Scatter simply couldn’t be controlled. He eventually brought out