Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [257]
When they got to Graceland, the guys unloaded the bus, and as Marty started to leave, he went in the hallway to see if Elvis needed anything. He was near the front door, next to his parents’ bedroom, kneeling on one knee, his head in his hands, sobbing. Larry was standing over him, trying to console him.
“Elvis, what’s wrong?” Marty said.
“Marty, I saw my mama.”
“What do you mean?”
“I walked in the door, and I saw her standing here. I saw her, man.”
Elvis went upstairs to his bedroom, which had recently been redecorated in a black-and-red Spanish motif, with two television sets embedded in the green Naugahyde ceiling. The effect of the room was oddly womblike, with an amniotic calm. More and more, Elvis demonstrated a need for just such an atmosphere. Whether his “vision” of Gladys was simply triggered by hearing the song or by what psychiatrists call hallucinations of bereavement, where individuals believe they have actually seen someone who has died, Elvis required time for himself. He stayed upstairs for days, refusing to come down.
In early December, he had recovered enough to gather the gang at the Memphian nearly every other night, screening Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, After the Fox, with Peter Sellers, Fantastic Voyage, and Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round. Then to torture himself, he slipped in Ann-Margret’s remake of the John Ford classic Stagecoach.
He’d actually been thinking of all things western lately, including horseback riding, as he had two films coming up—Stay Away, Joe, and Charro!—in which he would probably be required to ride. Just before Christmas, it turned into his latest obsession, and he went on a shopping spree for riding accoutrements and, finally, horses. He would be a gentleman farmer, he thought. By the end of the year, he would have an entire stable of horses and start clearing the area behind Graceland for a riding ring and a barn.
“My happiest memories of Elvis are the times—there were few of them—when he dropped that wall, when he became the person he might have been without all the pressures,” Priscilla says.
One such time was the day he bought horses for everyone at Graceland. “I can still see him out there in the dirt, in his jeans and heavy coat and cowboy hat, going around, writing everybody’s name on the stalls (‘Daddy’s,’ ‘Priscilla’s,’ ‘Mine’) with a red marking pen—watering the horses, blanketing them. He looked so satisfied, so . . . simple.”
Two of the horses were bays, and soon he would buy a black quarter horse named Domino as a Christmas present for Priscilla. But on Christmas Eve, he had another gift for her. He walked into her ornate bathroom-dressing room while she was brushing her hair and bent down on one knee and presented her with a small black velvet box. Inside, from Harry Levitch’s jewelry store, was a ring of twenty-one diamonds, one for each year of Priscilla’s young life.
“Satnin’,” he said, “we’re going to be married.”
It wasn’t the most romantic place for a proposal, but then it was more of a directive than anything else.
“I told you I’d know when the time was right. Well, the time’s right.”
He didn’t really want to marry her at all, according to Sonny. “There was still love there, but the intensity was gone. But he’d given his word to Priscilla’s father, and when it came to her being twenty-one, he asked Elvis to fulfill his obligations. Elvis resisted for a while, and then [Major] Beaulieu spoke to the Colonel. The Colonel went to Elvis and said, ‘You can do one of two things: Marry her or break it off. You can’t continue to live with her, because things will get out.’ ”
That New Year’s Eve, Elvis held his annual party at the Manhattan Club. But when he got there, he couldn’t find a parking place, and after circling around a few times, he gave up and drove home. While his guests enjoyed a catered dinner to the music of Willie Mitchell and his band, Elvis sat at Graceland, restless and dissatisfied, his foot going a mile a minute.
Shelley Fabares was paired with Elvis for the third time