Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [215]
Upstairs, she gazed at the luxurious carpets and furnishings and then at his king-size bed. “I immediately thought of how many women might have slept there . . . whose bodies he had embraced and fondled . . . and even worse, whose lips had passionately pressed his and driven him to ecstasy,” she wrote in her autobiography. “I couldn’t think about it anymore.”
She took a quick bath and dusted with powder she found in the medicine cabinet, and soon they were lying next to each other. He told her he hadn’t been able to get her out of his mind since Germany—that she had been the one thing that kept him going.
Their kissing was passionate and intense, and as they began to explore each other, he “discovered that I was still as untouched as he’d left me two years before.” But her sex drive was even more powerful.
“I was ready,” she has said.
He wasn’t. “He was glad I had saved myself, but was still committed to my purity. What could I say? What could I do? I wanted him, I know he wanted me, but according to him, the time wasn’t right.
“We’ll know when,” he said and had Joe drive her to the Barrises’ home, where she “reluctantly” spent the night. However, that was the only night she spent with George and Shirley. After that, she slept in Elvis’s bed.
And so, as President Bill Clinton would do nearly thirty-five years later, Elvis and Priscilla parsed the meaning of what constitutes sex, and then lied about it for years, Elvis insisting to the guys, as Priscilla did, that she was a virgin until their wedding night. (“I believe that with all my heart,” Charlie Hodge said.) If they did not have full-out sex, it was because Elvis was content with the foreplay he preferred to intercourse. But Elvis would tell one of his last girlfriends, Mindi Miller, that he and Priscilla had, indeed, been sexually involved long before they married, just as Priscilla confided the same to Billy’s wife, Jo Smith. Publicly, meanwhile, she continued to perpetuate the myth.
The day after Priscilla arrived in Los Angeles, Patti Parry did her hair “in that big boom-bah,” as Patti puts it. “She had light hair, too, and we dyed it black.” It was Priscilla’s idea, Patti says, but the seventeen-year-old already knew what Elvis liked, or thought she did. At first, he was critical of it and made her cry. But everything got smoothed over: They were leaving the following day for Las Vegas, taking the motor home and staying at the Sahara Hotel, run by the Colonel’s mob friend, Milton Prell.
“She’s a nice girl,” Alan Fortas told Elvis. “A little young maybe.” Alan didn’t want to come right out and say he thought theirs was an inappropriate relationship. That wouldn’t have been his style. Instead he said there were a lot of pretty girls who were legal age. But Elvis insisted that seventeen-year-old girls were a lot more advanced than seventeen-year-old boys. “Yeah,” Alan said, “but they’re still jailbait.”
In Las Vegas, Elvis took the first steps in grooming Priscilla to be his perfect wife. He bought her half a dozen gowns and matching shoes—in part to make her look older, so she could accompany him to adult clubs—and then took her to the famous Suzy Creamcheese boutique for wilder clothes. Finally, to complete her new look, he asked Armand, a hotel hairdresser, to come to the suite. The cosmetologist then spent two hours teasing and twisting up her hair with one long curl falling at her left shoulder. Then he went to work on her makeup, applying the kohl, mascara, and eyeliner so heavily that no one could have been able to tell “if my eyes were black, blue, or black and blue.” When he finished, Priscilla had the classic, exaggerated cat-eye makeup that defined the extreme 1960s Vegas style, replete with two pairs of false eyelashes.
“That was what Elvis wanted,” she wrote. “When I put on my brand-new brocade gown, my transformation to a sophisticated siren was complete. I looked like one of the