Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [290]
In the middle of December, he started calling Joyce Bova again, asking her to come to California. She couldn’t, she told him. Her committee was investigating the My Lai incident. She was putting in twelve-hour days. They went round about it again, and finally he just informed her he was making arrangements for her to come the following day.
“I can’t . . . Elvis you know I can’t,” she pleaded. “I don’t see why you can’t come here.” He started in, saying maybe she wasn’t interested after all, and she snapped at him, blurting, “Anyway, what about your wife?” They exchanged a few tense words, and then she heard a click.
When he went back to Vegas for four weeks on January 26, 1970, he was again the talk of the town and drew almost universal acclaim, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner writing, “The new decade will belong to him.” This time, Bill Belew dressed him in one-piece jumpsuits made of stretch gabardine (“I got the idea from a karate suit,” Elvis would say), which gave him freedom of movement. Most were either all black or all white, including a stunning white suit cut to the sternum with a “necklace” of rope at the neck.
The reviewer for Life magazine, a Columbia University professor named Albert Goldman—later a controversial Presley biographer—took particular note of the costume and the “male cheesecake” who wore it. Though he savaged the outfit as effeminate and indicative of the star’s “immaculate narcissism,” Goldman admitted that “not since Marlene Dietrich stunned the ringsiders with the sight of those legs encased from hip to ankle in a transparent gown has any performer so electrified this jaded town with a personal appearance.”
He also derided the fan reaction. “Watching the women in the audience lunge toward the stage like salmon up a falls becomes the show’s real comic relief,” he wrote. But Elvis managed “very well with his constituency by occasionally grabbing a blue-haired lady at ringside and kissing her firmly on the mouth.”
Not all the ladies were blue-haired, by a long shot, and when Elvis returned in August, he would begin the ritual of handing out scarves to the women brave enough to make their way downstage. Charlie would stand behind him like a king’s courtier, feeding what seemed to be an endless supply. Then Elvis would wipe his brow with one, and as the women screamed, shrieked, and elbowed one another for standing room, Elvis would religiously place one in their outstretched hands. It was rock-and-roll communion, Vegas style.
Everything was coming together now, the return to the stage, the resurgence of fame, and the industry respect. Now it was time to test the waters for touring, to see if the faithful only came to Vegas, or if they were still out there, tucked away in the small towns and walking the streets of the bigger cities.
At the end of February, he flew to Houston on Kirk Kerkorian’s private jet. There, in his first performances outside Las Vegas since 1961, he played four concerts over two days at the Houston Livestock Show, breaking attendance records by some 10,000. Robert Hilburn, reviewing for the Los Angeles Times, called the first evening performance “masterful.”
The appearances warranted a press conference, and Elvis said that while the size of the Astrodome was daunting (“It scares the . . . it’s a big place, man”), in a way it felt like a homecoming, because he played so many early dates in the Lone Star state during his Louisiana Hayride days.
Yet at one point, the shows looked as if they might not happen after all, remembers the Sweet Inspirations’ Myrna Smith. “The promoters didn’t want us to go, because it was in Texas, and at that time, they weren’t as liberal as they are today. They told Elvis not to bring ‘those black girls.’ Elvis replied, ‘Okay, but I’m not coming, either.’ ” Then he went a step further by making a promoter’s daughter drive the Sweets around in a limousine.
For the second day’s show, Priscilla flew in, just as the Houston papers reported rumors