Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [238]
She immediately fell in love with him, and she was surprised that it took her such a short time to forget the guy who jilted her. The relationship lasted fifteen months, through three film productions.
“At one point, I had to ask Elvis about other ladies in his life. He said, ‘Well, I don’t want to talk about that. There’s somewhat of a commitment down the road, [but] I don’t know if I can keep it. Right now, we’re dating each other and there’s nobody in my life.’ ”
Counting Ann-Margret, Yvonne Craig, Cynthia Pepper, and Priscilla, who went with him to California on the film, Gail Ganley was at least the fifth woman Elvis courted during the seventeen-day shoot of Kissin’ Cousins.
Psychologist and Presley biographer Peter O. Whitmer says that Elvis’s behavior fits the description of satyriasis, an uncontrollable and abnormal sexual desire in men, the equivalent of nymphomania in women. And yet, “Of all aspects of male sexuality, the concept of satyriasis is as time-honored a behavior as it is difficult to define.” The ancient Greeks sculpted statues of the desire-reveling man-child, epitomizing the charming carelessness of youth. The ancients also held to the sacred customs of “satyr dances,” or religiously observed and licentiously performed moratoriums on morals, staged to glorify fertility and the central act of sex.
In the 1970s, sex researcher Judith Singer Kaplan, emphasizing the psychological origins of what she termed the “Sexual Desire Disorder,” divided this behavior into six levels, the top being “Hyper Active,” where individuals are simply unable to regulate their desires, and they engage in frequent, compulsive sex, many experiencing several orgasms a day.
“For Elvis,” says Whitmer, “it seems essential that his psychological baggage as a twinless twin be seen as creating his hypersexual desire. Childhood trauma is generally accepted as the basic cause for such disorders. In his case, the trauma of being a surviving twin was infused into his psyche before birth, and resulted in an exaggerated need for human contact. This was perpetuated by his relationship with Gladys.”
As Elvis reached puberty, especially, Whitmer posits, “Human contact, sexual or otherwise, replicated his first memories of touching another human and provided him with a lodestone to his most meaningful sense of identity—having been ‘whole,’ one of a pair of twins. It was a ‘desire’ that controlled him, not vice versa.”
In interviews with twinless twins, the psychologist reports, these two themes—the insatiable, yet impossible need for human contact, and their lack of control over it—appear nearly universal. Studies show that twinless twins experience divorce and sexual dysfunctions at rates far higher than normal. A commonly heard and emblematic quote: “How can I become—or stay—married, when someone else was there at the very beginning?”
On April 30, 1964, during the making of Roustabout, Elvis met Larry Geller, who would change his life in profound ways. Larry, who had lived in Los Angeles since the age of eight and gone to beauty school with Patti Parry, was a hairdresser in the salon of Jay Sebring, whose celebrity clients included Warren Beatty and Steve McQueen. Elvis’s usual hairdresser, Sal Orifice, was unavailable, and Elvis was looking for someone who did good work and didn’t mind traveling once in awhile.
“I was styling Johnny Rivers’s hair one afternoon, and the phone rang and it was Alan Fortas. I picked it up and I heard this southern drawl, and Alan said, ‘Elvis heard about you and he wants you to come up to the house to fix his hair.’ ”
Larry showed up at Perugia Way around 4 P.M. that day, and as they talked, Elvis found him both personable and engaging, especially when Larry launched into a discussion about the subject closest to his heart—esoteric studies and the metaphysical.
Elvis nearly bolted up in his chair.
“What you’re talking