Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [250]
Looking back, she says, “The King of Rock and Roll explained the whole love thing to me over tacos and cheeseburgers in his dressing room for an hour. If that’s not something to remember, I don’t know what is.”
On one of his days off, Elvis went with the Colonel to see the recently completed memorial to the U.S.S. Arizona, which Elvis had helped fund with his 1961 benefit concert. Parker had designed an enormous bell-shaped wreath for the occasion, with one carnation for each of the 1,177 men who died there, and an admiral gave Elvis and his party a special tour on his private boat. Jerry Schilling remembers standing next to Elvis at the rail as they looked down through the water at the sunken ship. They were both surprised to see oil from the engines still bubbling up to the surface. Elvis was visibly moved. “Those guys are still down there,” he said, speaking very softly.
He couldn’t get it out of his head and talked about it when he got back to L.A. But when Suzanna Leigh returned home, all she talked about was Elvis. One woman in particular hung on every detail. Suzanna was among a group of film stars, including Deborah Kerr, to be presented to Queen Elizabeth. Nervous, Suzanna walked up to Her Royal Highness and curtsied, but before anything else could happen, the queen gushed forth: “Do tell me all about Elvis Presley. . . . What we all want to know is whether he is going to come over here.”
Queen Elizabeth was not the only British subject eager to meet Elvis. On August 27, under heavy secrecy and security, the Beatles made a visit to Perugia Way. In a sense, their visit was anticlimactic—at first, the Fab Four seemed too awestruck to speak. Elvis, clad in a red shirt and gray slacks, was sitting on the couch, his leg constantly twitching, while the Beatles nervously came and sat cross-legged in a semicircle on the floor. “There was a silence, and they were looking up at him, no they were gaping at him,” remembers Larry Geller. “He out-eclipsed everyone, and they knew it.” Finally Elvis stood up and said, “If you guys are just going to stare at me all night, I’m going to bed.”
That broke the ice, and then Elvis, John, and Paul picked up guitars in the den and played three songs, “Memphis, Tennessee,” “Johnny B. Goode,” and “See, See Rider,” with Elvis on bass. Elsewhere in the house, Ringo, Marty, and Billy shot a bit of pool, while the Colonel, Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein, Alan, and Joe spent the evening playing roulette and shooting craps. Larry, hoping to talk with George about metaphysics, followed him outside, where the quiet Beatle smoked a joint by himself under a tree. The next day John, who had famously remarked that “Before Elvis, there was nothing,” told Marty it was the best night of his life. Paul would later call it “odd.”
Just before they left, Elvis took the Beatles in the back of the house to show them a gift from the Colonel, a large wooden sauna, stationed outside his bedroom. Larry went along. “We all walked through this long hallway up to the sauna, which had a little glass window. Paul looked in, and he turned to Elvis, and he said, ‘Who’s that?’ We opened the door, and there was a fourteen-year-old girl, huddled down in a fetal position. She jumped up, and screamed, and lunged at Elvis, and someone pulled her away. Elvis said, ‘Don’t hurt her! Don’t hurt her! She’s only a fan.’ He was so protective. It was really beautiful. But no one ever figured out how this girl got into the house. It was impossible, with the security.”
As the quartet went to get in their cars, a fan took a picture of the swirl of activity in the driveway. Several of the wives were there—Patsy Lacker, Jo Fortas, Joanie Esposito, and Jo Smith, pregnant and in maternity clothes. Later, it turned up in a magazine with the headline, “The Night Elvis Shared His Women with the Beatles!”
“Jo laughed like crazy,” says Billy Smith. “She saved that for a long time.