Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [212]
Director Taurog didn’t notice, and when Elvis came off the set, he walked straight to the nearest chair and sat down.
“Did you see that?” he whispered to Joe. “I couldn’t stop the feeling. Geez, I hope they don’t have to reshoot this. The ceiling might get me this time.”
Of course, Joe told all the guys, who teased Elvis mercilessly.
When he went to the dailies, Elvis nearly leapt from his seat. “Hot damn!” he said, “Will you look at that?” There was no mistaking the woody, which was not only obvious, but prominent. Joe tried to quell his fears, saying the studio would probably cut it out in the editing.
“Man, I hope they don’t see it and decide to cut it off before we get out of here,” Elvis cracked.
But when the film was released, there was “Little Elvis,” rising to attention and aimed directly at Laurel Goodwin.
On the whole, says Goodwin, whose character vied against Stella Stevens’s for his affection, “Elvis did not like this film. . . . Once he commented to me, ‘One thing about working with Wallis is that he spends a lot of money on the production, the accommodations, the catering, because he has me so cheap. With the money he makes on my movies, he then can afford to go off and do Becket.”
Elvis got along well with Laurel, who was Wallis’s second choice, replacing Dolores Hart, who had decided to enter the convent. Laurel, who was nineteen years old and making her film debut, found Elvis surprisingly sweet and attentive. He told her that he had lost Gladys four years before, and “truly believed he would one day rejoin his beloved mother.” The teen actress spent a lot of time with Elvis and the guys, who “all treated me like protective big brothers.”
However, Elvis seemed to clash with Stella Stevens. On the surface, they should have gotten along, as Stella, a year younger than Elvis, was born in Mississippi, grew up in Memphis, went to Memphis State, and had once worked as a model in the tearoom of Goldsmith’s department store. But according to Goodwin, she “had to be ordered by Hal Wallis, to whom she was under contract, to do the film.”
Stella concurs that she wasn’t keen on making an Elvis Presley picture (“I was looking to work with great actors”), and when she read the script, she threw it across the room, calling it “dreck.” She was miffed to be cast as the girl Elvis dumps, and as a singer herself, ticked that Marni Nixon dubbed her voice in the nightclub scenes. She never saw the film, she asserts, and never will.
“I was thought of as the bad girl, while Elvis was crazy about little girls in white cotton panties,” Stella has said. They never dated, because when Red West called her to see if she wanted to “hang out,” she thought Elvis should have called her himself. “They were just a group of boys having fun, but I was a grown woman by then, or life had made me one,” says the actress, who married at fifteen, had a child at sixteen, and divorced at seventeen. “I had nothing against Elvis. I thought he was greatly talented.”
But the two clashed on his professional standards. “I said, ‘Why do you do pictures like this instead of seeking out the best directors in the business?’ He said, ‘Why knock success?’ I wasn’t knocking it. I was saying, ‘There are no limits to the work you could do, rather than these singin’ and a’lovin’ and a’fightin’ films.’ ” The longer she talked, though, “the more he disliked me.”
In recent years, when a fan approached her for an autograph and asked what it was like working with Elvis, Stevens reportedly said she couldn’t stand him, and that when they were alone together, he forced himself on her, and she had to fight him off.
Whether that was true, more and more, the angry Elvis used physical force with women, including Anita.
In early 1962 she was out in California at the Bellagio Road house