Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [222]
“Elvis said, ‘This is Priscilla, from Germany.’ I looked at him and smiled, and gave him a nod, like, ‘Yeah, she’s really pretty.’ He showed her off like he was showing off a new car. She was his trophy, his new toy.”
Barbara Little, George Klein’s girlfriend, remembers how nervous Priscilla looked that Christmas, sitting in the kitchen in bobbie socks, a kick-pleat skirt, and cardigan sweater. She was filing her nails and trying to mix with a group of adults she didn’t know.
And, in fact, Priscilla wasn’t sure where she fit into Elvis’s life. She only knew she was hurt that he flirted with other girls in front of her on their nightly outings. But in a pattern that would continue through their relationship, he always turned it around on her: “He’d accuse me; he’d say that I was just jealous; I was inventing things; I was confusing friendliness with flirting. His accusations were made with such skill that I’d wind up apologizing to him.”
She was ambivalent about his lifestyle, too. All these people were always around, and except for the time they spent in the bedroom, it seemed like Elvis preferred the company of the guys to her. On her last trip over, she’d gotten so bored watching him play touch football that she took off in his limousine and drove around the field just to amuse herself.
In truth, the relationship was mind-boggling for both of them, and Elvis wrestled with all kinds of conflicting emotions. Deep down, he yearned for lasting love and respected the institution of marriage, but at the same time, he didn’t want to be tied down to one girl. There was also the matter of one of the biggest stars in Hollywood approaching his twenty-eighth birthday with an underage girl in his bed. He knew, consciously or not, that he was emotionally still a child, and so the fact that he was involved with a minor didn’t feel wrong at all. In fact, it felt right. But then that got confusing, too. In his schizophrenic choice of gifts that Christmas, as Suzanne Finstad noted in Child Bride, he defined the relationship as both older lover–Lolita (the diamond ring), and father–daughter (the puppy).
All he knew for sure was how right Priscilla looked at Graceland, and how his mother would have claimed her as her own, the way Dodger did. In fact, he thought of his mother all the time he was around Priscilla. He patted her all the time, called her Nungin (young’un in baby talk), and sometimes also Satnin’.
After she’d been there a few days, Elvis thought he had to have her there all the time. In early January 1963, on the morning she was supposed to go home, he told her he loved her, that he didn’t want to let her go. They were sitting in his upstairs office.
“You’ll finish your senior year in Memphis,” he said.
“My parents will never agree to that.”
“I’ll talk them into it.”
“You can’t.”
And he couldn’t. At least not yet.
So Priscilla flew on back to Frankfurt. The two moaned together on the phone, and he redoubled his efforts to persuade the Beaulieus to let her move to Memphis.
Priscilla, too, worked on her parents, especially on her stepfather. On January 5, she wrote to Elvis to say, “I’ve been talking with my dad and a decision hasn’t yet been made. But still, he hasn’t said no, so at least I know there’s a chance. Like you said, his main concern is [my] living in a strange place and where I will stay.”
In mid-January, before he left for Hollywood to start his next film, Fun in Acapulco, Elvis phoned the captain for an extended talk. He understood Priscilla’s grades hadn’t been that good—she had failed algebra and German, and barely passed English and history, altering her report card to make a D minus look like a B minus—when Elvis was stationed in Germany. Now she was failing English, too. But if she came to live in Memphis, he would see to it