Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [246]
In 1965, her interior gyroscope was already at work, and the “child-woman” began working hard to drop the prefix on her self-image. Lamar saw that while Elvis controlled the guys, starting in 1965, Priscilla started lording it over the wives. She expected them to cater to her, Billy thought, and took advantage of her position, borrowing the wives’ clothes and not returning them, and asking to use their credit cards.
As she asserted herself, the group began to splinter into separate camps—Jerry Schilling gravitated to Joe and Priscilla—and a caste system took hold among the couples, Joe and his wife, Joanie, leading the pack behind Elvis and Priscilla. Marty thought Priscilla paid attention only to Jerry and Joe, and that Joanie became her shadow.
“It became like the First and Second Family,” Lamar says. “It just galled Billy and Marty, and I wouldn’t put up with it. I told them all to go fuck themselves.”
Suddenly, there were rules. Only Joe and Priscilla were allowed to take pictures of Elvis, according to Billy, “and then after they took them, you couldn’t even get a copy of them. Same with home movies.”
In general, Elvis did not want the wives to come out to California or accompany their husbands on trips. “He was going to play around, and he didn’t want anybody carrying tales,” as Lamar puts it. “Being with Elvis put a hell of a strain on a marriage. And on being a family. I was home so infrequently that my kids would see an extra place at the table and wonder who was coming.”
Billy’s wife, Jo, was especially hurt over the way Elvis excluded the wives, as many of the guys now had families, and he didn’t always seem to respect those ties. She also thought she was in a vulnerable position because of Elvis’s closeness to Billy. Though the two men were first cousins, Elvis regarded him as a brother, someone he had reared and guided from the days when they first came to Memphis and lived in the slums. “I saved you,” Elvis told him over and over.
“Elvis couldn’t live without Billy,” says Jo. Part of it was the connection to Elvis’s past, especially to Gladys, since Billy had been close to her. Part of it also was that Elvis’s father and Billy’s father had been in prison together, so there was nothing that Elvis had to be ashamed of with him. Consequently, Elvis wanted Billy with him all the time, and he resented it when Billy got married.
“Sometimes Elvis was like the Devil to me,” Jo admits. “I pitied him, but I also feared him. I knew the power he had over everybody who worked for him, including my husband. When he took him on trips, it was like he was taking him from me, because I lived by myself in Memphis while Billy lived in California. When our first child was born, Elvis wouldn’t let Billy come home. And I didn’t understand that. I lived in fear that Elvis would win and take Billy away forever. Patsy Lacker, Marty’s wife, was my best friend then. Patsy used to say Elvis made her a hateful person, even to herself. We threw rocks at the bus and wished them all dead.”
Jo Fortas, Alan’s wife, was also at her wit’s end. Alan had developed a frightening dependency on pills, usually downers—hypnotics—though he’d take uppers when driving cross-country, and Jo didn’t know how to handle him. She’d call Red or Marty when things got really out of hand, and one of them would have to go over to their apartment on Beverly Glen Boulevard and search for the pills and flush them down the toilet. Usually it was Marty. “We had to haul Alan over to UCLA Medical Center in ’65. He had thirty-five yellow jackets in him. Tried to kill himself over this tug-of-war between Elvis and his wife. Alan had six, seven, maybe eight real good scares.”
To alleviate some of the tension, Elvis would invite Jo Smith to live in the house in L.A. in the mid-1960s. Lamar thought it made her seem like one of the guys. But Jo thought Elvis was jealous of how close she and Billy were. He wanted a similar closeness with just