Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [288]
He laid his usual flirtatious prattle on her, arranged for her and AnnMarie to sit in his booth, and invited her back after the show.
Joyce felt almost lightheaded watching him perform, and just then it occurred to her, seeing him with all the shrieking women, that he might be expecting more from her than she was prepared to give. She promised herself she wouldn’t let it get out of hand, but once she was back in his private dressing room, she could feel an intensity from him—the way he gripped her hand, the way he moved too fast. Suddenly, a woman came up and mistook her for Priscilla, an easy thing to do, and she could feel her face flush.
Things might have ended there, especially as AnnMarie had promised Paul Anka that they would come see him backstage. But then Charlie was standing there with something for her to drink, and Elvis was babbling on about how “unique” she was, because he could just tell. And it was then that Joyce uttered the words that would capture Elvis’s attention forever.
“Actually, there are two of me,” said the spunky brunette. “I have an identical twin sister.”
Elvis stared at her with a look of “surprise and shock, but like he was trying to digest it,” Joyce remembered in a rare interview for this book. And then his whole demeanor changed. Gone was the superstar pose and the man on the make. Suddenly Elvis was just someone who’d lost a vital part of himself.
“My little brother, Jessie Garon, died when I was born,” he told her. “You know, they say the twin who survives lives on carrying the qualities of both, of the one who died.”
She thought she’d upset him, but as he talked on, she saw that the look was really one of discovery and recognition, that he had met someone who knew what it was like to be a twin. It turned out that Joyce was also the second born, like Elvis, and in an odd way, this was his own personal reunion. Meeting her almost gave him the ability to look and see what might have been, if not for fate. Now he wanted to hear more about her sister.
Joyce and Janice had been nearly inseparable since birth, she told him. They did everything together, even though Janice had recently married.
“Do you miss her a lot?” he asked. “I mean, when you’re away from her, like tonight?”
Joyce told him she’d wished all night that Janice were there to share each amazing moment of her visit. “But, of course, I know she knows how happy I am.”
Elvis asked her what she meant.
“Well, it’s hard to explain, but Janice and I have always had this capacity to feel the other’s emotions, no matter how many miles separate us from each other.”
Now he looked at her for what seemed like a long time, and she got the feeling that “he had many questions he wanted answered.”
“Joyce,” he said, “would you come up to the suite later and have dinner with me?”
Oh, wow. Now she was stunned. Her hands turned to jelly. She didn’t know about this. Suddenly she felt as vulnerable as if she were naked. She was afraid. She’d had a strict Catholic upbringing in Baltimore, and her father was a sergeant on the vice squad. Her mother had been a dancer, and because of her own history with show people, she had imposed a “relentlessly repressive regime” on the twins their whole lives. And so Joyce turned Elvis down, saying she and AnnMarie had promised to meet some people.
He pressed her. “Is this some guy? Y’know, I can tell . . . some guy you maybe just met?”
She finally told him what was really on her mind, that she figured he picked a different girl each night, and tonight it was she, and that wasn’t what she wanted. “I adore you,” she said, “but no thank you.”
All he wanted was to get to know her better, he said. “Besides, you ought to realize that it’s not physically possible for me to be with a different girl every night and still do what I do up on that stage.