Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [284]
It was a dreary, if emblematic, end for an actor whose talent was misused, misunderstood, and all but choked off by the big screen. “He came to Hollywood a greasy golden boy, dripping with sexuality,” observed entertainment journalist Steve Pond. “He left an entertaining, safe icon.”
As Elvis finished his film obligations, Parker was busy mounting a colossal promotion and advertising campaign, drawing on his background as an advance man for the carnivals to build Elvis into the biggest act in Vegas. “He just loaded this hotel,” remembered Shoofey. “He had every billboard in the entire city, not only in Vegas, but leading all the way to California. There was so much excitement it was unbelievable. We got calls from all over the world. We couldn’t accept all the reservations.”
Parker had insisted that Elvis be the second star in the new showroom, not the first, so that the hotel could work out any of the bugs with the lights or sound before Elvis went in. Barbra Streisand was the International’s opening draw, then, but by 5 A.M. after the close of her engagement, anticipation for Elvis was so great that fans were already standing three blocks deep to get into the hotel, and the lobby was jam-packed. Parker, meanwhile, stayed up all night plastering Elvis posters, banners, and flags all over the elegant walls and installing Elvis stand-ups in the lobby. Management bit their tongues and went along with it: Hotel employees donned straw hats with Elvis plaques on the front, while croupiers added red, white, and blue “Elvis” armbands. “They looked like riverboat gamblers,” says Imperials member Joe Moscheo. “Honestly, it was a very strange atmosphere.”
In May, Elvis took Priscilla and Lisa Marie back to Hawaii on vacation for two weeks. He needed time to think, to formulate the show. And he wanted the kind of deep Hawaiian tan that would be seen from the last row of the showroom. Since he never flew commercially under his own name, he booked the family as “the Carpenters,” using the name of his Change of Habit character.
As always, he brought along a retinue, adding the Fikes to the previous year’s party of the Espositos, the Gambills, and Charlie Hodge. They spent their weekdays at the Ilikai Hotel in Honolulu, and moved to the more intimate Coco Palms on Kauai for the weekend.
Priscilla, her overinflated hairstyle a laughable memory, was now much more comfortable in asserting herself and stepping out of her role as Elvis’s wife. She was still refining the changes in her appearance—growing her hair long and straight to her waist and lightening it to a honey brown, for example, and choosing her own style of dress. Now more serious about her dance lessons, she had also taken up photography and delighted in decorating the new house.
She would still say that her biggest ambition was “to be a complete person,” but she had recognized that the marriage was never going to work, that she had entered into a pure fantasy and an impossible, unworkable dynamic with a man who was by turns a father figure and a boy. “I need an equal,” she would say. “I need a relationship with a man I can grow with.”
Then she would be beguiled by him again and lapse into the old patterns: “Elvis brought out this mothering quality. I cut his meat up for him. I tasted it before he ever had it. I would fix his deviled eggs, cut off the top, put his butter in, prepare all his food as a mother would for a child. I would test it to see if it was too hot. Even making his coffee . . . I loved doing it for him. We’d all baby him. Then you’d see him onstage and he looked so strong and virile, it was like, ‘Oh, my God!’ But there was this child that was still in there.”
By the time they landed in Hawaii, Priscilla was tired of all of it—of the guys who surrounded them to the point of suffocation, of the upside-down hours, of living someone else’s life. “It was never about me,” she would say. “It was really about him on every level.”
She reached her threshold on