Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [264]
And so the three of them—Colonel, Vernon, and Priscilla—went to work, sharing their secret only with immediate family.
At 9:41 on the morning of May 1, 1967, Elvis and Priscilla said “I do” before Nevada Supreme Court Judge David Zenoff in Milton Prell’s private suite at the new Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas. The justice would remember that Priscilla “was absolutely petrified, and Elvis was so nervous he was almost bawling.”
Afterward, the newlyweds held a press conference in the Aladdin Room, where Priscilla’s stepfather told the press, “Our little girl is going to be a good wife,” and Elvis turned to his father for answers to questions he didn’t like. “Hey, Daddy, help me!” he said good-naturedly. But Vernon only smiled. “I can’t reach you, son,” he said. “You just slipped through my fingers.” Owner Prell laid out a $10,000 champagne breakfast with suckling pig and poached salmon, and then the couple flew to Palm Springs on Frank Sinatra’s Learjet to begin their honeymoon.
The Colonel arranged every detail, from the room to the rings, calling on his high-powered friends and connections. Elvis and Priscilla went along with it for the sake of expediency and secrecy, though later Priscilla would write “as we raced through the day, we both thought that if we had it to do over again, we would have given ourselves more time . . . I wish I’d had the strength then to say, ‘Wait a minute, this is our wedding, fans or no fans, press or no press. Let us invite whomever we want.’ ”
But Priscilla and Elvis had also allowed the Colonel to pick the attendants and the guests, who numbered fewer than twenty. The suite couldn’t accommodate any more, they said. So while there was room for George Klein, who flew in from Memphis, there was not enough space for Red, or Jerry, or Alan, or Richard. Charlie knew about it—he drove the Colonel from Palm Springs—but there wasn’t room for him, either. Some of the guys were invited to the breakfast, but others had to save their congratulations for a second reception to be held at the end of the month at Graceland, where Elvis and Priscilla would wear their wedding finery once again.
Larry learned about it when he picked up the afternoon paper. Sonny was similarly informed. “I was making a motorcycle movie, and I was on location. I came back to my room, turned the TV on, and the guy said, ‘Elvis Presley got married today . . .’ And I went, ‘What?!’ I thought, ‘Dad gum, that was fast.’ ”
Hurt feelings ran rampant, and Red, who would remain estranged from Elvis for two years over the exclusion, had a hellacious fight with the Colonel. Charlie later defended the way Parker handled things, saying he was “just doing what he always tried to do with Elvis, and that was keeping something like that from becoming a circus.” But in retrospect, says Joe, “We should have used another arena so that everybody could have been there.”
The Memphis paper ran the headline “Wedding is Typically Elvis—Quick, Quiet, and in Style,” and fan reaction was mixed. There was no national hue and cry as there would be with Paul McCartney’s marriage two years later, as the new youth of America considered Elvis rather hokey, a has-been. And fans of Kay Wheeler’s ilk had largely moved on, Kay herself saying, “Well, somebody finally caught him. I guess Elvis’s career is so down already that it doesn’t matter anymore.” In Europe, the girls seemed to take it harder.
On May 4 the married couple flew home from Palm Springs, arriving in Memphis around 6 A.M. After a quick stop at Graceland, they went on to the Circle G to continue their honeymoon. It was there, in one of the trailers, that Priscilla conceived a child, a girl, to be named Lisa Marie, so near the name Elvis and Anita had picked out years before. The baby would be born February 1, exactly nine months after the wedding. It was at the Circle G that Priscilla and Elvis had sex for the first time, they would say. Marrying at