Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [211]
Eventually, they took him back to Memphis, where he lived in a cage behind Graceland. Even there, he was a little terror, tearing the wig off a maid named Daisy when she went to feed him. He died not long after, hanging on to the side of the cage, hard as a brickbat, with his long arms out and his legs bowed. Elvis always wondered if Daisy had poisoned him.
Elvis’s own treatment of Scatter was indicative of how his behavior continued to change in the wake of his frustration over his film career and his escalating dependency on drugs. In 1962, also on Bellagio Road, his temper began to show more and more with the women who attended his parties. He got so mad at an actress that he picked up a watermelon and hurled it at her like a missile and hit her in the rear. But the more famous incident came with a girl named Judy who Elvis thought failed to mind her manners.
She had tried to get his attention, and when he went downstairs to play pool, she followed him and continued her pursuit. Finally, he had to say, “Look, I’m shooting pool, and I’m going to finish this game before I do anything else.” With that, she took the cue ball off the table, and he flushed with anger.
“If you do that again, they’ll have to surgically remove it,” he heatedly told her.
She stared him down. “You’re a smart-ass son of a bitch, aren’t you?”
No one called Elvis a son of a bitch—to him it was a slur against Gladys, and he launched the cue stick before he even knew what he had done, hitting the girl in the chest near the collarbone and almost harpooning her. “She fell right over,” Joe remembers. Elvis rushed to see about her, though he didn’t apologize, and he had one of the guys take her to the doctor. “That was the first time I saw him really, really mad, just unbelievably mad,” says Joe. Later, he cried.
In Lamar’s view, “Elvis had no parameters. He moved the lines of behavior wherever he wanted them, and if he went too far, he moved them out farther. His discipline was nonexistent. And the more insulated he got, the stranger he got.”
In March 1962, Elvis began preproduction on Girls, Girls, Girls, his first picture for Hal Wallis after Blue Hawaii. Wallis sent him back to Hawaii for location shooting, and again assigned sixty-three-year-old Norman Taurog to direct.
The producer was now certain that Elvis was best showcased as an entertainer specializing in light musical comedies, and not as an actor. To that end, Elvis would begin a long series of movies in which he would play the carefree bachelor with an offbeat occupation. The plot almost always turned on some feeble predicament over which he would triumph, winning the girl in the process.
For Girls, Girls, Girls he was cast as a charter boat pilot who moonlights as a lounge singer to buy a sailboat that once belonged to his father. The musical numbers were slighter than those in Blue Hawaii, and Elvis was humiliated by having to sing to a crustacean (“Song of the Shrimp”) and warble about the joys of ocean fishing (“We’re Coming in Loaded”). He channeled his discontent through karate, breaking as many as forty boards a day in his hotel suite until Wallis stopped him, fearing the star would injure his hand.
For Elvis, the film’s saving grace was the obvious hit, “Return to Sender,” which soared to number two and stayed on the charts for fourteen weeks, following on the heels of several other huge records, “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” “Good Luck Charm,” and “(Marie’s the Name) His Latest Flame.”
Yet one more song, “The Walls Have Ears,” a dance number with costar Laurel Goodwin, became a private joke with Elvis and the guys. “He dressed in the black trousers made for the scene,” Joe wrote in his autobiography, “without putting on underwear. Elvis rarely used underwear.”
“Hey, Joe, these pants don’t feel right,” he told him. “They’re rubbing me the wrong way.”
“The dance scene was complicated,” Joe continued. “The apartment was rigged for special effects, including a