Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [265]
Just because Elvis now wore a wedding band did not mean that either his feelings or his behavior would change. On May 8, one week after he and Priscilla tied the knot, Ann-Margret married Roger Smith, also in Las Vegas. When she opened an engagement there on June 7, Elvis sent flowers in the shape of a guitar. He would do so for each of her Vegas bookings until his death.
Already Elvis knew his marriage had been a mistake—that he and Priscilla had never truly been compatible, and that they had tragically outgrown their dreams. He had fallen for a fourteen-year-old girl, and she, as an eleven-year-old, for the flickering image of a bad boy, dancing suggestively on TV. Neither of them was the same person now. They had married ghosts.
On July 1, two months after his wedding, Elvis went to see Ann-Margret’s show, bringing along his father and several of the guys. They visited her in her dressing room afterward. At one point, Ann-Margret slipped off to the innermost room of her dressing area. Elvis followed and shut the door.
“Our eyes met and suddenly the old connection burned as brightly and strong as it had years before,” she wrote. He complimented her on her show and then turned wistful, thanking her for all the happiness she had given him, and recounting the good times they had shared.
“Elvis then stepped forward and dropped to one knee. He took my hands in his. I felt the heat in both of our bodies. In a soft, gentle voice weighted by seriousness, he told me exactly how he still felt about me, which I intuitively knew, but was very touched to hear.”
But as usual, Elvis had not one but three women on his mind. He was making a movie, Speedway, with Nancy Sinatra at MGM, and Priscilla had just learned that she was pregnant. Elvis was thrilled and announced it on the set on July 12. “This is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me,” he gushed to reporters.
And at home, he affectionately called Priscilla “Belly.”
“Look who’s talking!” she wanted to say, though Elvis had dieted himself thin again. Still, Priscilla was stung by it, especially as she never even needed a maternity dress.
“Elvis was always talking about women who let themselves go when they were expecting, who used it as an excuse to gain weight. So I actually lost eight pounds when I was carrying. I ate only eggs and apples. I never drank milk.” She never saw a doctor, either. She never saw anybody new, because Elvis wanted only his same friends around. It was life in a bubble. “We were in a cocoon.”
At Elvis’s nudging, Nancy offered to throw a baby shower for the new mother. But behind the scenes, she was busy fighting off Elvis’s advances. She had fantasized about him for years, even before she met him on the day he returned from Germany in 1960. Now that she was divorced from Tommy Sands, it was easier to think about being involved with him. But she refused to have sex with a married man, even as she indulged his adolescent games, so reminiscent of the roughhousing he did with his slumber party teens on Audubon Drive.
At lunchtime, they’d go back to her dressing room trailer. Elvis would mess up her hair and her clothes, teasing her, and when he got especially frisky, he’d pin her to the floor and dry hump her. They’d laugh and giggle and toss back and forth in the mock throes of ecstasy. “Did you come yet?” he’d ask, a big smile on his face. But there was no mistaking that Elvis was truly turned on. “Do you feel Little Elvis?” he’d whisper in her ear. And, of course, she did.
When they walked out of the trailer for the afternoon’s shoot, people stared at them and whispered behind their backs. Priscilla was well aware of it—she had worried that something was between them as far back as 1960—and somehow they took a bit of perverse pleasure from it. Nancy asked her one day how she kept her figure with the baby and learned that Priscilla ate only one meal. “Good for you,” Nancy praised, but what she was really thinking was, “She’s got her hands full