Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [213]
She stood reading it, just as Priscilla had read Anita’s letters in Germany.
“I remember it said something to the effect of, ‘Please call my daddy,’ and, ‘If you call my daddy, I know he’ll let me come over there. I want to come over there soooo bad,’ like young girls talk.”
It took her breath away. “Elvis had said, ‘She’s a friend. She means nothing. She’s a fan.’ ”
She faced him with it as soon as he got home. “I said, ‘What is this letter? Who is this, this Priscilla? You said she was just a child!’ I was just furious, and he was furious, too, because I had found it. Oh, he was so upset! He grabbed me and threw me up against the closet. I said, ‘You’re telling stories, and everything you said was a lie!’ I packed my bags and came back home that night to Graceland, to Grandma.”
When she walked in the house, the phone was ringing. She didn’t want to talk to him, but he kept calling.
“I remember when he got me on the phone, he said, ‘Little, please don’t tell anybody about this. This girl, again, she’s just a child. She’s just a fourteen-year-old child. It means absolutely nothing. She just wants to visit. And if you told anybody, I’d get in a lot of trouble, she’s so young.’ He just begged me, ‘Little, Little, Little.’
“I just couldn’t imagine. Coming over to the United States . . . it didn’t sound right to me. But I said, ‘I won’t tell anybody,’ and I never did. I never did tell anybody.”
By late 1963, on Kissin’ Cousins, Elvis had a myriad of women on his mind, including costars Yvonne Craig (left), who dispensed maternal advice, and Pamela Austin. Craig also appeared in It Happened at the World’s Fair. (Robin Rosaaen Collection)
Chapter Twenty-Two
“A Little Happiness”
By the time Priscilla arrived for a two-week visit on June 17, 1962, she was no longer a fourteen-year-old girl. Elvis may have still thought of her that way, and even preferred for her to remain fourteen, which could be why he referenced her as that age in his argument with Anita. But in truth, Priscilla had celebrated her seventeenth birthday three weeks earlier. And she was a far more experienced girl than the one who had stood at the air base in Germany and waved good-bye to her soldier boyfriend.
But she was also more insecure about her place in his life. When she saw him on the big screen kissing such glamorous movie stars as Juliet Prowse, Tuesday Weld, and Joan Blackman, she wondered how she could ever measure up to such women. She was a schoolgirl in Germany.
For “two torturous years,” as she would put it, Elvis maintained only sporadic contact. Every day she waited for the mail, and every night she listened for the phone. He wasn’t much of a letter writer, but he sent her records with clues in the song titles: “I’ll Take Care of You,” “Soldier Boy,” “It’s Now or Never,” “Fever.”
“When I didn’t hear from him, I was heartbroken,” she has written. “When I did, I was ecstatic.” On the telephone, he assured her he still loved her, and no, he wasn’t going with Nancy Sinatra or any of those actresses she had read about in Photoplay magazine. He hadn’t called for the past month because he was making a movie. It didn’t mean anything.
But her fear—or possibly her mother’s fear—that he had lost interest in her spurred Priscilla to write the letter begging Elvis to bring her to the States. She didn’t know what was going on or what to do. And neither did her parents, who must have weighed the predicament of whether it was better to have Priscilla consorting with reckless boys in Germany or with an international playboy ten years her senior.
Finally Elvis said he would work out the arrangements with her stepfather and send her a first-class round-trip ticket to Los Angeles. “When Elvis wanted something with utter passion,” Priscilla says, “he could convince anyone of anything.”
Now he went to work on both