Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [287]
While Parker was figuring Elvis’s future in numbers on a coffee-marked table covering, Steve Binder was discovering that the Colonel had barred him from going backstage. It would be thirty years before he found out Elvis had been expecting him, eager to get his feedback.
“I was convinced at the time he left the ’68 special that he had a whole different mind-set of what he wanted to do with his life. And quickly, that window of opportunity was shut tight, and he ended up being a saloon singer in Vegas just to indulge the Colonel’s gambling habits.”
As Elvis’s guests and friends filtered back to congratulate him, he told them what he repeated the next day to reporters—that he’d been “a little nervous for the first three songs, but then I thought, ‘What the heck, get with it, man, or you might be out of a job tomorrow.’ ”
Patti Parry was there, as much for support as to see the show, and sat near him to help quell his butterflies. As celebrities filed through his dressing room, Elvis looked around nervously for Ann-Margret and Roger Smith, and invited them up to the suite later on. Then, hoping to impress Roger, he leaned over to Patti and whispered in her ear: “Go put on every piece of jewelry I ever gave you.”
At his press conference the next afternoon, wearing a black suit with a standing collar and an accent scarf of bloody orange at his neck, he resembled not so much a Vegas performer as a European prince, at once modern and timeless. The questions were predictable, his answers sometimes not.
“Did you enjoy performing live again?” came a voice.
“Yes! This has been one of the most exciting nights of my life.”
“How does your wife feel about you being a sex symbol again?”
“I don’t know . . . you would have to ask her.”
“Why have you led such a secluded life?”
“It’s not secluded, honey, I’m just sneaky.”
Elvis had gone into the engagement without a serious girlfriend. He had called Celeste Yarnall and made it clear he wanted her to come be with him, be his lady, but she turned him down. She had a brand-new Collie puppy, she said, which was true. But the larger issue was that “I was married still, even though I was separated, and I just knew it would be the wrong decision for me to enter into that lifestyle. I didn’t go to the Hollywood parties, never drank or smoked, went to bed early. Maybe if I had said ‘yes,’ I would have been the Linda Thompson in his life. Who knows?”
On August 16, 1969, twenty-four-year-old Joyce Bova, a junior member of the Armed Services Committee of the Unites States House of Representatives in Washington, D.C., came to Las Vegas on vacation. With her was a girlfriend, AnnMarie Wade, a huge Elvis fan. AnnMarie couldn’t believe it when Joyce lucked into a pair of comps to his show on their third night, but they were a gift from Paul Anka, who had inadvertently embarrassed her with an offhand comment during his own performance.
Joyce and AnnMarie were waiting in line for their passes on August 19 when suddenly a greeter from the International plucked them from the line and asked if they’d like to meet Elvis, right then before the second show. It seemed a most peculiar series of events, but Joyce and AnnMarie went with the flow and soon found themselves being led down a maze of hallways and into a room with Vernon Presley and the members of the Memphis Mafia. Everyone was waiting for Elvis.
Joyce worked with famous people every day, but when he finally walked through the door, “I wasn’t prepared for how beautiful he was. Beautiful. That was the word for it.” Elvis inspired not so much desire in her, she would write in her memoir, Don’t Ask Forever: My Love Affair with Elvis Presley, but “a mixture of curiosity and awe.”
Elvis responded to her in kind, for Joyce—striking, so petite as to