Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [231]
“What’s going on here?” she wrote in her memoir. “I’m tired of these secrets. Telephone calls. Notes. Newspapers!” She picked up a vase of flowers and threw it, watching it shatter against the wall.
“I hate her!” she yelled. “Why doesn’t she keep her ass in Sweden where she belongs?”
Elvis went on the offensive.
“Look, goddamn it! I didn’t know this was going to get out of hand. I want a woman who’s going to understand that things like this might just happen.” He looked at her hard. “Are you going to be her—or not?”
“I stared back at him, furious and defiant,” she wrote, “hating him for what he was putting me through.” But in the end, she went home, wanting to please him, wanting not to disappoint her parents. When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated later that month, Elvis watched the awful aftermath with Ann-Margret, not Priscilla.
Kissin’ Cousins, in which Elvis plays dual roles as a dark-haired, upright military man (Josh) and a blond hillbilly Lothario (Jodie), was in some ways a new take on his own story. Producer Sam Katzman, known in Hollywood as “King of the Quickies” for his low-budget pictures and tight shooting schedules, filmed it in seventeen days.
Parker had asked for him after the experience on Viva Las Vegas. He didn’t much care what Katzman’s product was like, as long as most of the money ended up on the Colonel’s side of the equation. While the film was in production, Parker negotiated a $750,000 contract with Allied Artists for Tickle Me. Another slight picture, it would sacrifice quality production values, known actors, and even new music (the soundtrack would be made up of previously recorded songs) to pay half the budget in salary to the star. Like Tickle Me, Kissin’ Cousins, with a budget of $800,000 compared to $4 million for Blue Hawaii, would be an embarrassment to Elvis, especially as the finale prominently showed his stand-in, Lance LeGault. (“It’s too expensive to shoot it over—no one will even notice,” said Katzman.) Many regard it as Elvis’s worst picture ever.
The film required Elvis to wear a light hairpiece for his twin, the character of Jodie, and according to Cynthia Pepper, who played the role of Corporal Midge Riley, “He hated that blond wig. He didn’t want to come out of the dressing room.”
He found it emasculating, and it took him back to the Elvis of old, before he reinvented himself as the suave and dark-haired leading man. But in some ways, Elvis should have felt comfortable on the set. For a few days, at least, he enjoyed a triumvirate of women who re-created the psychological set-up he enjoyed with his mother and, by extension, Jessie Garon.
Yvonne Craig, cast in the role of Azalea, Josh’s girlfriend, had already proven herself a Gladys substitute. In blond Cynthia Pepper, whom he dated and requested after seeing her in the TV series Margie, he found a replica and a peer. And when Priscilla was on set, he had his “child” to rear and shelter.
As Cynthia noted, “Everybody had a different relationship with him. When we did the scene where he sings to me, we were out in Big Bear Lake, and we had a pause. It was sprinkling a little bit, and we were talking, and he said, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing here.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘I mean making all these movies. I should be back home driving a truck.’ ”
He watched over Cynthia, who was twenty-three but young and naïve, by her account. When producer Katzman repeatedly made innuendos about the two of them having spent the night together (“He said, ‘Why didn’t you wake me up when the alarm went off?’, and I would just die with embarrassment, because it wasn’t true”), Elvis put the funny man in his place: “Hey, that’s enough. Leave her alone.”
Elvis was not above pulling his own prank on her, though. The script calls for Cynthia’s character to flip him over her shoulder, and they rehearsed the scene over and over. “One time I flipped him, and no one was around, and he didn’t get up. He had his eyes shut, and it was like he’d hit his head and he was out. The only thing I could think of