Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [226]
When Elvis received his release from the picture in late March, he hurried home to Priscilla, who felt isolated, lost, and awkward, making no real friends at school, and knowing only Grandma, Vernon, Dee, and Patsy in the entire town. Though Vernon was tight in doling out spending money (thirty-five dollars every two weeks), sometimes she went shopping at nearby Southland Mall, where her frightening vampire look drew stares. Jacque Carter, who lived in Whitehaven, remembers seeing her there. “She had jet-black hair that was all backcombed, heavy eye makeup, and white lipstick. She was very quiet and shy.”
Over the next few weeks, Elvis bought Priscilla a red Corvair as an early graduation present so she could drive herself to school—she was embarrassed at Vernon’s chauffeuring her every day—and $1,400 worth of clothing at Laclede’s on Union Avenue. He encouraged her shopping habit: It gave her something to do while he was off making movies.
“Elvis expected her to be totally loyal,” says Billy Smith. “He thought, ‘I’m in California, and I can fool around and it won’t mean anything, because it’s going to be over and done with. But when I get back home, I know I’ll have somebody there.’ He had that old southern belief—‘A woman’s place is in the home.’ ”
Several years ago, Siouxzan Perry, manager of Tura Satana, Kitten Natividad, and other stars of Russ Meyer’s sex-and-violence porn films, sat around a table with author Pamela Des Barres, who was writing a book about rock stars and groupies. A number of the Russ Meyer girls were there, and predictably, they played the “Who Have You Slept With?” game. The names came fast and furiously. “Somebody said, ‘Jim Morrison,’ ” Siouxzan remembers. “And somebody else said, ‘Elvis.’ And practically everybody at the table went, ‘Oh, I slept with Elvis.’ It was just the funniest thing ever.”
“He did not want me in Hollywood,” Priscilla admits. But, of course, she wanted to be with him wherever he was, and as their separations grew longer and more frequent, their relationship grew strained. She felt as if she were living a double life, not unlike the way she lived after she met him in Bad Nauheim. “I was a prim-and-proper schoolgirl by day, and Elvis’s girlfriend by night.” That meant she stayed up until 5 A.M. to attend all the outings, and then had to be at school by 8:30 A.M. “I would average maybe one and a half hours of sleep to make all the good grades for my father. That was the difficult part.”
But it was obvious that Elvis, too, compartmentalized his life. “Hollywood was there and Graceland was here, and never the two should meet,” as Priscilla has put it. For Elvis, “The two worlds represented a balance, or perhaps a perpetual imbalance, between his professional life and his home life.” When a movie wrapped, he couldn’t wait to get home. But then he felt trapped there and got anxious for his freedom and the companionship of other women. Then there was the matter of explaining just what he was doing with a teenager. And so Priscilla was kept back.
When he was home, though, “the place lit up. I lit up. And I was willing—even eager—to cater to his every whim. We all were.” And so she forgave him for not attending her graduation ceremony, knowing it would cause too much commotion. She also overlooked his constant criticism: If she slumped, he straightened her back. If she had a chip in her nail polish, he pointed it out. He asked her not to eat tuna fish, her favorite food, because he hated the smell. But she despised the way he repeatedly rapped her on the forehead to remind her not to frown or wrinkle her brow. “Pow! I still feel his hand there,” she says. “If I looked up, it had to be with my eyes only, so the skin would stay smooth.”
“I was someone he created. I was just a kid, and I was consumed by him. I could never speak my mind. All I desired was not to disappoint him.”
He stayed in Memphis for several months that spring, and Priscilla insists she still hoped each night would end with Elvis “finally making love to me. I was drunk with ecstasy. I wanted him. I