Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [271]
In Live a Little, Love a Little, the tall actress had a small part as Sally, the Mermaid Model, for which she wore an orange-and-yellow fish tail. In a waist-length blond wig attached to pasties, she also appeared to be topless. Elvis’s character photographs her sitting on a diving board at Marineland of the Pacific.
They met just before shooting their scene, when, unable to walk on her fish tail, she was brought up for her introduction in a wheelchair. (“It was very awkward to be sitting in a wheelchair with a fish tail naked, but that was our moment.”) Still, they mostly waved from a distance, and didn’t do much talking on the set—the more dramatic moment came when a whale jumped out of the tank and ate her jelly doughnut.
She went back to her dressing room afterward, and Joe knocked on her door and said that Elvis would like to see her, and the three of them took a ride up Marineland’s tall tower. She thought it was odd that Joe should accompany them, but romance bloomed anyway, and Elvis asked for her phone number as they spun around the top. She couldn’t believe how long and dark his eyelashes were—not knowing he dyed them—and when he pulled her close and slipped his hand over hers, she knew he would call. “It happened pretty quick. It was just a fun, happy, easy time.”
Their physical chemistry was obvious. They were both extraordinary-looking, and together—she so fair, and he so dark—they seemed the ideal complement, shadow and light, yin and yang. As they began spending time together, they talked about their biggest disappointments and fears, and what they both hoped to find in life. He was more articulate than she would have guessed, and she was surprised to learn he was a deep thinker. He told her about his restlessness, his search for inner peace, and they both acknowledged their frustrations over their careers, Susan confessing “there were times when I would cry that nobody loved me for anything but my body.” They also bonded over faith. They talked about scripture, and about how “people abused religion,” and they recited the Lord’s Prayer together, soulfully, feeling each word.
Mostly they tried to shut out the world. Sometime between finishing the film and beginning the NBC special, he sent a Learjet for her and took her for a getaway in Arizona, where he had shot Stay Away, Joe on location. Later there would be a trip to Las Vegas.
Because he was married, and because he was Elvis, they largely stayed in the room, especially in Arizona. They were playful together, almost innocent. He called her his “Teen Queen,” which made her smile.
To amuse him, she began transforming his lubricious raft of hair into a variety of impossible dos—the surfer style, combed over to the side, and Elvis’s favorite, the butler style, parted down the middle. “He laughed so hard. He just thought that was the funniest thing to see the hairstyles that I would come up with. I would show him the mirror and he would make a silly face and chuckle.”
Aside from their obvious interests, they had family things in common—they both worshipped their mothers, and they were both the parent of a young daughter. Susan’s child, Courtney, was just over a year old, and Lisa Marie two months. “He was very proud of her, and at the time I wasn’t married, and my daughter was the apple of my eye.” They showed each other pictures of their babies but did not dwell on what anchored them at home, because “it would have brought a different reality into it, and take away what we had.”
She didn’t get the feeling that he was running from anything (“I think he was enough of his own person that he did what he wanted”), and he told her that he and Priscilla weren’t together. It was true, in a way—they were married in name only, and Priscilla spent most of her time at the Hillcrest Road house. Susan thought maybe he was only telling her what she wanted