Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [253]
In a way, Elvis was relieved. But Wallis was the producer who brought him to Hollywood. He remembered how excited he had been when Wallis first came calling. He was still a kid then, bursting with ambition, eager to learn, and even more passionate to show what he could do. Back then, when he lay on the pillow at night, he dared to dream of winning an Oscar some day.
The Colonel certainly wasn’t one to soothe over hurt feelings, but he pointed out that Elvis’s new MGM contract, while backing off from the $1 million hallmark, called for four films at $850,000 each, with the profit participation raised to 50 percent. Elvis didn’t talk with Priscilla about it, other than to say that Wallis had bailed. In her view, “He insulated himself from his own feelings. Whenever he was scared, or doubtful, or guilty, he’d say, ‘I can’t feel that way.’ ”
However, his second disappointment was harder to dismiss, for the larger ache was the news that Ann-Margret had become engaged to actor Roger Smith. He knew they saw each other, but he had refused to believe it was serious. He’d told Marty, “Roger calls her, and she goes out to dinner with him, but there ain’t nothing there.”
They had parted some time before, as pressure mounted from Priscilla, her father, Colonel Parker, and even Vernon to follow through on Elvis’s implied promise of marriage. It was building again, especially as Priscilla was about to turn twenty-one. There was also the fact that “Elvis never would have had a superstar as a wife,” Joe says. But Elvis couldn’t quite shut down his feelings or even tell Ann-Margret to her face, and so he did nothing.
It confused her. She thought about the time when her parents were living with her in her one-bedroom apartment on Cañon Drive. Her landlords were a Danish sea captain and his wife by the name of Jorgensen. Elvis had met them, and after Mr. Jorgensen passed away, Elvis suggested they go see Mrs. Jorgensen on her birthday, to try to cheer her up. “He was just so sensitive and considerate, and he knew about honor, and manners, and respecting your elders, and being civilized,” she would say. So where was he now?
Marty and Joe ran into her on Sunset Boulevard one day when she was out riding her motorcycle. Marty blew the horn, and she pulled over.
“What the hell is wrong with your boss? One minute we’re in love, and the next minute I don’t hear from him again. He won’t even take my calls.”
But as time passed, she was able to rationalize it: She was independent and wouldn’t take orders from anyone, and Elvis required slavelike devotion. For so many reasons, then, as Ann-Margret puts it, “Both of us knew that no matter how much we loved each other, we weren’t going to last.”
Lamar believes the truth is that Ann-Margret shut Elvis down because of his commitment to Priscilla, and that she never intended to marry him. On the other hand, Larry thinks that when she couldn’t get a commitment from Elvis, she began dating Roger with an eye toward a reliable future, even though she and Elvis still occasionally saw each other. Either way, says Lamar, when Elvis learned she was engaged, “He got real upset about it.”
More than forty years later, Ann-Margret refuses to talk about the relationship in depth, other than to say that she and Elvis found something deep and primal in each other that she still feels compelled to protect. Whether she is also shielding the feelings of her husband and Priscilla, who she never mentions by name in her autobiography, she seems to grieve for Elvis like a recent widow. When she went to make Tennessee Williams’s The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond in 2007, the cast and crew were told that no one was to make a reference to Elvis while she was on the set. And in 1994, when television interviewer Charlie Rose pressed her for details, she teared up: “Our relationship was extremely special. It was very strong, and very serious, and very real. We went together for one year. And he trusted me, and I do not want to betray his trust