Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [216]
More specifically, she looked exactly like Elvis’s stripper friend, Tura Satana.
“Goddamn, what happened to Little Cilla,” said Elvis, who had darkened his own eyelashes. “You look beautiful.”
“Sure doesn’t look like the same girl we met in Germany wearing a sailor dress,” Joe said.
She had changed in other ways, too. In Germany, Priscilla had only saved the pills Elvis offered her to stay awake during school. But now she took amphetamines and sleeping pills right along with him, to keep up with his hours. She liked the feeling. The pills melted away her inhibitions and put her more in sync with Elvis in every way. But she was moving in a world she didn’t know and couldn’t handle without the drugs. And deep down she was scared and confused, loaded with lurking anxiety.
The night before she went back home to Germany, Elvis told her he would see about bringing her to Graceland for Christmas, and their lovemaking reached new heights, even if Priscilla was coy in describing it. “Elvis wasn’t going to let me go home without my taking a little of him with me,” she wrote. “He didn’t enter me; he didn’t have to. He fulfilled my every desire.”
When she stepped off the plane in Germany, Priscilla’s parents could hardly believe their eyes. She had left two weeks earlier in a white cotton suit and nothing more than a touch of mascara. But she came home in a tight black dress, with her hair in an architectural monstrosity. Her mother remembers that she “obviously had been crying. Her eyeliner was running, her eyes were red. She looked lost and terribly sad.”
Captain Beaulieu was more blunt: “Her eyes looked like two piss holes in the snow.” When Priscilla asked to go to the ladies’ room to wipe her face, her father yanked her up. “You’re going straight home,” he barked. “If you left it on this long, you might as well keep it on another hour.” He barely said another word to her until they got home. For a girl whose self-worth had been tied to her physical appearance since she was a child competing in beauty contests, it was devastating.
Now Elvis, too, was in deep, and he faced his toughest Christmas since the year he brought Dottie Harmony to town. If he convinced Captain Beaulieu to let Priscilla return for the holidays, he was going to have to break things off with Anita. There was no way he would not be at Graceland for Christmas. And if he were in Memphis with Priscilla, there was no way that Anita wouldn’t know. Anita would expect to spend Christmas with him herself.
“It was a tough choice,” in Joe Esposito’s estimation. “Anita is a great lady.” But Priscilla looked like Gladys, and Anita didn’t. In fact, every time he looked at Anita, he was reminded of how he’d disappointed Gladys in not marrying her. Anita was also older and might resume her career at any time. If Elvis were to marry, he wanted a traditional wife who stayed home and cared for the house and family. “He pretty well raised Priscilla to be that way,” says Joe. “He fell out of love with Anita because he started dating Priscilla.”
On July 10, 1962, Elvis returned to Memphis and resumed his usual activities, playing touch football, renting out the Memphian, and three or four nights a week, watching the night turn to dawn on the rides at the Fairgrounds. As before, Anita was his date, but he knew not to mention Priscilla to her. She’d found out that Priscilla had visited him in L.A., and she knew the teenager was in his life. But Anita convinced herself that Priscilla’s youth ruled her out as serious competition and clung to the notion that there were certain kinds of girls that Elvis spent time with, but others he reserved for marriage. Besides, they’d been together five years. It was a real relationship, not some little infatuation.
Then one evening, Anita was coming down the back stairs at Graceland when she heard Elvis, Alan, and Lamar talking in the kitchen, sitting around the breakfast bar.
As she neared the door, “I heard Elvis say something like, ‘Well, I’m just having a really hard time making up my mind between