Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [293]
That August Elvis made changes to his Vegas lineup. Joe Guercio came in as the hotel’s new musical director, and now there was a new girl onstage, too. Millie Kirkham, the venerable session soprano, had been subbing for Sweet Inspiration Cissy Houston, who took off for a solo career. But Millie needed to get back to Nashville. So Kathy Westmoreland signed on for what was supposed to be three weeks. She would end up staying seven years.
At barely twenty-five, Kathy was classically trained and immensely talented—her high notes would summon angels—but though she was a top L.A. session singer, she was also idealistic and naïve, believing in storybook love.
She’d been with Elvis’s band about two weeks when he invited her up to the suite. “I thought it would be a party, but he said he just wanted to get to know me. When I walked in that room, there were all these knock-out beautiful women waiting to meet Elvis. He came into the room and walked directly over and sat next to me.”
He asked about her family life, and he was intrigued that her father had sung in such MGM films as The Great Caruso and The Student Prince, which spoke to his Mario Lanza fixation. He also liked it that she was petite, only five foot one, and that she’d been runner-up in the Miss Teenage America contest in 1962.
They connected right off: He told her about his marriage situation (“I was a little uncomfortable with that”), and stated flatly and unemotionally that he didn’t have that much longer to live, that his family had died young. “He told me that he knew exactly how much time he had, that he was going to die at the age of forty-two, close to the age of his mother.” Kathy was taken aback but found herself attracted to his mind, his humor, everything about him. “He reminded me a lot of my own family.”
When she gave him her virginity, she thought they might actually make a go of it: They carried around the same metaphysical books (“We were both on this search for the truth”), and he told her Priscilla had no interest in the spiritual dimension. Though he insisted he had an open marriage, “He kept on saying, ‘I wish she would divorce me so I wouldn’t have to divorce her.’ ” Kathy knew he had other girlfriends and that she would be sandwiched in between. But when he said, “I love you” and then moved on, she was dazed and hurt, even as she had called a halt to the affair at one point, finding no valid excuse for adultery. The friendship, at least, would remain, along with the professional association. Onstage he called her “the little girl with the beautiful high voice.” Offstage, she was “Minnie Mouse.”
That same August he began seeing Kathy, he could no longer keep the strain of his life secret. On August 14, 1970, he told the Vegas audience that he’d been hit with a paternity suit. A Los Angeles waitress named Patricia Ann Parker claimed she had become pregnant with his child during his engagement earlier that year. Pacing the stage, Elvis angrily detailed why it couldn’t be true, using a vitriolic tone that shocked the majority of his audience.
Twelve days later came a major kidnap-assassination threat, which sent Elvis and the guys into overdrive. The Colonel called in the FBI and private detective John O’Grady, a former head of the LAPD Hollywood Narcotics Detail, who was already at work investigating the Patricia Parker case. For the next several nights, the entourage stood ready to move in, while Elvis performed with a pistol in each boot. An ambulance stood at the ready. Even Red, now back in the fold, was frightened.
“The lights were up in the audience more, and the curtains were closed,” Red remembers. “That was one of the strangest feelings I’ve ever had, because when he did his last song,