Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [278]
“Come on, Steve,” Elvis said to Binder. “These are always fun.”
Binder and Finkel sat on either side of him as he smoked his favorite stogie. Bones and Lamar anchored the end of the table, and Joe, Charlie, and Alan stood behind them. Almost everyone had on a yellow scarf—Parker had handed them out as gifts from Elvis.
The reporters were eager for answers.
“Elvis, why are you doing this show?”
“We figured it was about time. Besides, I thought I’d better do it before I get too old.”
“Do you think your audience has changed?”
Elvis smiled: “Well, they don’t move as fast as they used to.”
They were just starting to enjoy the exchange when the Colonel ended it abruptly, springing his client in full pitchman’s style. “Right over here, folks, get your picture taken with Elvis.”
“I have no proof to back this up,” says Binder, “but I felt the Colonel had the magic power. And I believe that before Elvis did anything, the Colonel would take him quietly into a room and use his hypnotism on him. Elvis was very insecure. But fifteen minutes later, he would come out oozing confidence, convinced that he was the greatest performer who ever walked on the stage.”
Somewhere around June 26, choreographer Jaime Rogers began rehearsing the “Let Yourself Go” dance sequence. Like everyone who worked with Elvis on the show, he was impressed: “People would be shocked to know how hard Elvis worked on this special.”
Dick Loeb, an NBC executive, would later nickname the production number “Bordello,” as it frames Elvis wandering into a house of ill repute. There, the Guitar Man is surrounded by a bevy of older, hardened prostitutes who paw and grab at him seductively. He has fun with them, and just as he is about to pick one for the evening, he spots a virginal innocent, a young girl with long blond hair who has yet to meet her first client. They eye each other from across the room, but as the Guitar Man makes his way toward her, the vice squad arrives, and he jumps out the window, continuing on his journey.
In the days leading up to the segment rehearsals, “Elvis ushered young girls into his dressing room like they were on a conveyor belt,” Alan remembered. And then the dancer playing the “Virgin” showed up: It was Susan Henning, Elvis’s mermaid from Live a Little, Love a Little. He had no idea she would be there, and Binder wasn’t aware Elvis even knew Susan when he hired her: “With her blue eyes, long blond hair, and angelic face, she just looked like the ideal person to cast.”
Susan thought she’d have a little fun with it.
“When I walked into the room where we were to rehearse the dance, he had his back to me. He had his little macho pose, and I think I had on a pair of short shorts. . . . I remember walking up and sticking my leg between his legs, and kind of doing a little can-can. He looked down [and said] his favorite expression, ‘My boy, my boy!’ ”
Susan spent her nights in Elvis’s studio dressing room, and then she would have to get up and rush to her parents’ home to pick up her daughter. “Mom would say, ‘You still taping?’ And I’d say, ‘Yeah, Mom, sometimes they need you late.’ I remember it was a teensy bed, and one night, one of my eyelashes came off on his pillow.” At first, it scared him—he mistook it for a spider, he later told the guys. “He thought that was so funny.”
Though Binder didn’t realize that Elvis and Susan were spending time together (“I was and still am very naïve about these kind of things”), it was obvious to everyone else that they were dating. Priscilla was always home with the baby, and Elvis and Susan flirted openly. Says Binder, “I understand that was the real reason Elvis didn’t want Priscilla around. A few years later, she told me Elvis said for her to stay home because