Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [270]
“One of the kissing sequences was covered from the crane. It was a long, long kiss, and Norman Taurog finally called out, ‘Cut, print, okay, lunch. One hour for the cast, half hour for the crew. Elvis, you can stop kissing Celeste. The girl’s gotta eat.’ The arc lights went ka-boom, ka-boom, and I could hear the crew starting to break up a little bit, but Elvis would not stop. He was kissing, and kissing, and kissing, and the set was getting dark. I started to laugh, so my mouth began to pucker, and he went, ‘What’s wrong, baby? What’s wrong?’ I said, ‘It’s lunchtime, Elvis.’ And he said, ‘Oh, okay. Come on, we’re going to feed you right now.’ He was adorable. He loved to play.”
She knew he’d done that with lots of costars, but she says they soon had a deep connection and labels their chemistry “profound.” Beyond that, she won’t elaborate. “I am very private about our relationship and I want to keep it that way. But we just had a lot of love for each other, and it was a very special time.”
Celeste was surprised that Elvis was more interested in hearing about her than in talking about himself. Still, she drew him out. He confided he was nervous about how fans would receive the film and his more progressive character. And he told her he was scared sick about the TV special, for which he was dieting on “cremated hamburger patties and shriveled-up peas with sliced tomatoes.” She loved it that he “could show his very highly developed feminine side” and thought he could only really be himself with the opposite sex.
They were in the middle of filming in April when Martin Luther King Jr., was assassinated, and they watched the funeral together in his dressing room trailer during lunch. Elvis took it hard. Not only was the “I Have a Dream” speech one of his favorite recitations, but Dr. King was shot in Memphis, practically a stone’s throw from Graceland. Elvis told Celeste the backstory of his own struggle—that he felt a tremendous brotherhood with the black community because he rose up from the poor and knew the hardships that poverty creates. He was also proud that blacks had embraced him as one of their own.
“He sobbed in my arms like a baby. He was just devastated and desperately would have liked to attend the funeral. We choked down our lunch and sang a little a capella tribute of ‘Amazing Grace.’ ”
Their relationship was hard to define, strung between the poles of pure friendship and romantic yearning. But they were both married, though Celeste and her husband would soon separate. “I was a good girl. I wasn’t a player. I wasn’t a party girl. Elvis had tremendous respect for me and he knew that I wasn’t anybody’s weekend girlfriend.” All the same, “He made me feel like I was the only woman in the world.”
Elvis had that effect on many women, but in truth, he was seeing another girl on the same film. Despite the birth of his daughter and his new family unit, he continued to lead a triple life and to maintain the emotional triangle that had shaped him since childhood.
Twenty-one-year-old Susan Henning, born in North Hollywood and reared in Palos Verdes, California, had been in the business since the age of six (Wagon Train, Father Knows Best). Her mother, the Swedish-born Golden Henning, was an actress, as was her older sister, Bunny. At fourteen, with her back to the camera, she appeared as Hayley Mills’s twin in the Disney movie The Parent Trap.
Like Celeste and so many of Elvis’s girls starting with Carolyn Bradshaw, Susan was a beauty queen. In 1965 she won the Miss Teen U.S.A. title, which launched her successful modeling career. By 1968, with her blue-green eyes and Rapunzel-like blond hair, she was the quintessential all-American girl. More than that, in a bikini, showing off her long legs and bronzed tan in commercials for Pepsi and Sea