Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [230]
Viva Las Vegas was, indeed, an exception, with the title song becoming one of the most recognizable and popular songs in the Presley canon. Elvis also sang the rest of the soundtrack with new enthusiasm. But Parker still seemed oblivious as to how the movie resuscitated his client’s spirits and musical dynamism.
None of that was lost on Priscilla, however, because by the time the cast and crew returned to Los Angeles, the press had picked up on Elvis’s relationship with Ann-Margret, the inspiration for his creative renewal.
“They hold hands. They disappear into his dressing room between shots. They lunch together in seclusion,” Bob Thomas wrote in an Associated Press story that summer.
And they talked marriage, she admits. But Elvis had stalling to do both in Hollywood and in Memphis. Earlier, he had described Ann-Margret to Priscilla, now eighteen, as merely “a typical Hollywood starlet.” Then one afternoon she picked up the Memphis Press-Scimitar and read a story headlined, “It Looks Like Romance for Elvis and Ann-Margret.” That evening, she grilled him on the phone. “Is there anything to it?” she demanded.
“Hell, no,” he lied and then repeated his mantra that reporters blew everything out of proportion. “She comes around here mostly on weekends on her motorcycle. She hangs out and jokes with the guys. That’s it.”
But Priscilla’s intuition told her otherwise. She knew he had little affairs all the time, but the fact that everybody called Ann-Margret “the female Elvis,” and that she had the same effect on men that Elvis had on women scared her. How could he resist that, his equal?
“That one affected her tremendously,” Joe confirms. “She was very, very upset. She couldn’t believe it, and she was very concerned that he was not going to marry her. I can’t even think what was going through her mind. That had to be very tough for her.”
Billy Smith says that Elvis and Priscilla had many arguments about Ann-Margret, usually upstairs in his room at Graceland. Then Priscilla came up with a new strategy. She watched Ann-Margret’s movies and learned some of her dance moves, then began dressing like her and doing her hair like hers, too. Billy’s wife, Jo Smith, tried to help her, and told Billy “she’d stand in front of a full-length mirror just cussing Ann-Margret, all the time trying to be as much like her as possible. It was pitiful.” Soon she enrolled in the Patricia Stevens Finishing School in Memphis.
But she also began emulating some of Elvis’s behavior, pursuing seventeen-year-old Mylon LeFevre, of the gospel group The Singing LeFevres. The first time she met the wild-haired teen backstage at Ellis Auditorum, Marty Lacker’s wife, Patsy, went with her and was stunned to see Priscilla openly flirt with him. After that, Patsy refused to go with her, as did Jo Smith. “She went down to the auditorium every time Mylon came to town,” says Marty. Once Mylon found out Priscilla was Elvis Presley’s girlfriend, he made himself unavailable.
When Elvis began his next picture, Kissin’ Cousins, in October, Priscilla insisted on accompanying him. She loved Los Angeles, and she’d grown tired of the stultifying pace of Memphis when Elvis wasn’t home. But most of all, she was there to size up the competition, knowing full well that Ann-Margret was still in Elvis’s life, even though Viva Las Vegas had wrapped six weeks before. She made sure to wear her five-star diamond on her ring finger.
But two days after Priscilla’s arrival, Ann-Margret stunned the entertainment world with a syndicated UPI interview from London, where she was attending the royal premiere of Bye Bye Birdie. She was in love with Elvis, she announced, but she didn’t know if they would marry.
Priscilla was hurt, humiliated, and livid. And when Elvis told her the Colonel thought she should return to Memphis until the publicity died down (“Honey, I’m gonna have to ask you to leave”),