Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [228]
Yet Elvis would find an even higher voltage connection with the twenty-two-year-old actress offscreen. Ann-Margret Olsson, born in Sweden and reared in suburban Chicago, had just made a splash in her third film, Bye Bye Birdie, a satire about the Elvis phenomenon and the teen mourning that accompanied his entering the armed services. Three months after its premiere, Sidney, who had directed her in Bye Bye Birdie, introduced her to Elvis on the set of Viva Las Vegas. He believed the meeting would be so momentous that he arranged for a studio photographer to be on hand.
“Elvis Presley, I’d like you to meet a wonderful young lady, Ann-Margret,” the director said. “Ann-Margret, this is Elvis Presley.”
Simultaneously, the two stars started to say, “I’ve heard a lot about you,” then stopped in midsentence, and broke into nervous laughter. They were both dressed like young professionals, she in a white knit, double-breasted jacket and A-line skirt, and he in a suit and tie. Their conservative appearance hid the fact that they both shared a devil within, she would later write.
“We were quiet, polite, and careful,” Ann-Margret remembered in her autobiography, My Story. “But I knew what was going to happen once we got to know each other. Elvis did, too. We both felt a current that went straight through us. It would become a force we couldn’t control.”
Ann-Margret was the female Elvis, all beauty, sex, and talent. She spoke in a breathy, morning-after voice that managed to sound real, and projected a paradox of midwestern reserve and raw sensuality. Men would have died for her.
On day one, they both realized the relationship would be serious, but whether Elvis knew it immediately, Ann-Margret was the woman he had waited for all his life. He had been deluded into thinking so many girls were his twin soul, but now he was face-to-face with the one woman who fulfilled that destiny.
She felt it, too, writing, “It was like discovering a long-lost relative, a soul mate . . . shy on the outside, but unbridled within. . . . In many ways, both of us, despite fame and whatever else we’d achieved so quickly, had remained very childlike, and emotionally dependent. We wanted to find that same nonjudgmental, unqualified love that our parents gave us. . . . He had touched something deep within my psyche.”
Just as they said the same exact words when they were introduced, when they began to rehearse their dance routines, they looked at each other and saw virtual mirror images: “When Elvis thrust his pelvis, mine slammed forward, too. When his shoulder dropped, I was down there with him. When he whirled, I was already on my heel.”
“It’s uncanny,” she said. Elvis grinned.
“The minute they looked into each other’s eyes, they clicked,” says Joe Esposito. “There’s no two ways about it. You could just feel the energy.”
Now Elvis asked Joe to find out if Ann-Margret was single. Learning she was, he bypassed his usual approach to courting and picked up the phone himself.
“Rusty,” he said, using her character’s name in the film, “how about going out with me and the guys to see a show?” It was a group date, innocent and friendly, and they were never alone for a second. But the next time he asked her out, he brought her home to Perugia Way, and he told the guys he wanted the house to himself when he got back. Their late-night talks revealed a shared love of motorcycles, music, and performing, along with strong family and religious ties.
At first Ann-Margret told no one but her parents. But soon, says Joe, the secret was out: “Everybody on the movie set will tell you that when they were together, it was obvious they loved each other.”
Soon they were wheeling through L.A. on their Harleys, and pedaling around Bel Air “on a bicycle built for double takes.”
“People honked, we waved,” she wrote.
It was the worst possible time for Elvis to be falling in love—only four months