Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [240]
Not long after, Elvis confided to Larry about his dilemma. “I have to make a decision,” he said. “It’s between Ann-Margret and Priscilla. I really love them both, but I’m choosing Priscilla because I want a wife who isn’t in show business, somebody who will devote herself to a family. Besides, I think our egos would clash.”
Elvis was also mindful of his promise to Priscilla’s stepfather. But that was problematic, too, Marty Lacker notes: “Elvis’s infatuation with Priscilla started wearing off early, right after she first came. But he put up with her because he didn’t want to hurt her, and because she was convenient.” Elvis was rearing Priscilla, but the dynamic was changing. “I’ll give you Elvis’s relationship with Priscilla in a nutshell,” says Lamar Fike. “You create a statue. And then you get tired of looking at it.”
When Priscilla came on the set of Girl Happy, a bathing-suit-and-babes romp set in Fort Lauderdale during spring break, she struck actress Chris Noel precisely the same way. “She sat in one of those director’s chairs, her hair piled up real high, and she was like a statue. She never moved. She just sat there staring.”
There was no communication, remembers Chris, who played a bikini-clad coed, and Elvis didn’t introduce her to anyone. “She gave off an untouchable vibe. Like, ‘I’m here because I have to be, but don’t anyone dare speak to me.’ So nobody said anything to her.” The actress thought Priscilla was stuck-up, but she also felt sorry for her. “It was like she didn’t have any friends, like she wasn’t even allowed to have a friend.”
Priscilla probably suspected that Elvis was distracted on the set when she wasn’t around. And, in fact, he was.
“He came on to me in a very strange way,” Chris says. “I was sitting in a chair one day, engrossed in watching people move things around on the set, when all of a sudden, there was this tongue in my ear. I was pretty defensive. I didn’t know who it was, and my reaction was to snap, ‘Lay off.’ And I turned around and it was Elvis. He said, ‘W-w-w-whud you say?’ Oh, my gosh, I almost died! How could I tell Elvis to lay off? But I did. I said, ‘You heard what I said.’ So he said, ‘Okay, if that’s how you feel.’ He knew that wasn’t a cool thing to do.”
She thought he would never speak to her again. But right after that, they were walking toward each other on the lot and, “Just over and over, he started singing ‘Leon,’ ‘Leon,’ ‘Leon,’ which is ‘Noel’ backward. He had quite a sense of humor.”
If Chris was Elvis’s love interest on the picture, his relationships with the other women on the set went a long way toward completing a familiar triad. Here, Shelley Fabares, on her first of three Elvis pictures, stood in for Jessie Garon. He constantly cut up with her the same way he had with Betty Amos on the Louisiana Hayride, teasing her all the time and elbowing her in the ribs. When Elvis sang “Puppet on a String,” Charlie Hodge remembered, “He’d say the P in the song, and her hair would go. . . . And they’d get to laughing. [The director] just sent them home. He said, ‘We’ll shoot around you.’ And they came back the next day and finally got it shot. He loved doing things with Shelley. . . . I think [she] was probably his favorite star.”
“Talk about brother and sister,” says Chris. “He totally adored her, because she wasn’t coming on to him like a bombshell.”
Neither was Mary Ann Mobley, Miss America of 1959, who was making her first film after five years of musicals and guest shots in episodic television.
“We never had any kind of romantic association,” Mary Ann explains, “because you were either one of the girls, or you were a lady. (‘Where is Mary Ann’s chair?,’ he asked the guys.) I was never invited to the house. He used to say, ‘Mary Ann, one day I’m going to have a party I can invite you to.’ He was very conscious of that. And I took that as a compliment.”
They enjoyed a true platonic friendship, she says, even though she found him completely arresting. (“The attraction was there. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who had such a dynamic presence