Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [219]
The scene proved livelier when they joined the guys and their dates afterward to watch television. Scatter, the chimp, made an appearance, all dressed up like a person in a little suit and hat. But Yvonne wasn’t wearing her glasses (“There was this thing that came into the room and someone was holding on to him”), and at first, she thought he was one of the boys being silly. She quickly caught on when Scatter started jumping around and misbehaving.
“He was really obstreperous, this animal. He would pry your mouth open, looking for gum! And he would belly up to the bar and bang his glass, and they would give him hard liquor and he would drink it. Then when he would get tired of it, he would pour it on the floor. Today, that couldn’t happen. Somebody would turn them in for animal abuse, because they shouldn’t have been getting this chimp drunk. It’s a wonder they didn’t kill him. But nobody did anything about it, and this was somebody’s rented house with this chimp loose in it.”
In a little while, Elvis invited Yvonne to his bedroom on the pretense of getting away from Scatter. Soon, “there was kissing and hugging and stuff like that,” but it wasn’t particularly passionate, and “there was no sexual relationship at all.” At twenty-five, Yvonne was two years younger than Elvis, yet she felt protective of him, and already the brunette sensed he liked her because she reminded him of Gladys. And so she launched into what she calls her “Mother Craig” lecture.
“I said, ‘You know, Elvis, it’s fine that you brought me here, but this is a dangerous move for you. You’re just lucky I’m the way I am, because you have no idea. You should be very careful who you bring here, because you’re in Hollywood now, and it’s a terrible trap. If you take a girl alone back here in your quarters she can say anything happened—cry rape, scream, carry on—and the courts will say you did it. There will be horrible publicity, and you’ll be in a lot of trouble. Do you do this often? I’m worried about you.’
“And I’m telling you, he sat there saying, ‘Yes, ma’am, yes, ma’am.’ ”
On the way home, she suddenly became overwhelmed with embarrassment. After all, he’d been in the business for years and knew all the pitfalls. But “it did occur to me that he needed talking to. He had such innocence that I thought, ‘Oh, my God, I don’t want anything bad to happen to him,’ and he did encourage this sort of motherly interest in him.” Besides, “I had seen some of the women the henchmen had in the house, and I thought, ‘I know where they picked up those girls, and I know what they have on their minds, too.’ ”
However, before she left that night, Yvonne and Elvis found common ground. She mentioned that when she was a teenager, before ballet dancing led to acting, she thought about going to medical school. She’d had her Gray’s Anatomy and Cecil-Loeb since she was sixteen, she said, and to her surprise, “He dragged out medical books and started showing me.”
Scooting close to her, Elvis paged through his Physicians’ Desk Reference.
“Do you have any pills in your house that you can’t identify?”
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“Well, if you do, this book will tell you what every one of them is.”
“I thought he was interested in medicine, but now I think he was interested in what you can take to keep yourself skinny, and what you can take that won’t be contraindicated with another drug and kill you.”
Elvis was, indeed, studying to see what kinds of pills he could take and in what quantity to keep thin, stay up all night, and then rest enough to be bright-eyed on the set. Even so, he made some near-fatal errors.
According to Alan Fortas’s memoir, Elvis: From Memphis to Hollywood, one occurred that November 1962 on the drive home in the motor home. Elvis and the guys had