Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [294]
But nothing did happen, except that Elvis became more on edge, and crowed that he’d been more willing to take a bullet than let some son of a bitch bully him off the stage.
It was about that time when Joyce Bova returned to Las Vegas, feeling odd about the way things had ended between them before they ever really began. On August 29, she surprised him, showing up in town with her friend Karen for support. She dialed Joe, who put Elvis on the phone. “You must be psychic, honey, I was just about to call you,” Elvis drawled, and he invited them to be his guests for the show.
Afterward, in his private dressing room, he greeted Joyce warmly. “You’re even more beautiful than the last time I saw you,” he said as they hugged. “You’ve don’t know what it means to me, baby, having you here. But it sure took you long enough.”
Elvis had made it clear that Joyce would be going up to the suite later on, and so she left him alone as he milled about with his other guests, including Ricky Nelson’s wife, Kris, and James Aubrey, president of MGM Studios.
Aubrey, a powerful Hollywood player known as “the Smiling Cobra,” and the inspiration for Jacqueline Susann’s 1969 best-selling book The Love Machine, was there that night on business, since he had green-lighted the documentary Elvis: That’s the Way It Is.
Elvis had already spotted Aubrey’s date, Barbara Leigh, an exquisite twenty-three-year-old model and starlet, sitting in the front center booth. She felt as though Elvis were making eye contact with her, but she wondered, “Why would he be looking at me? He could have any girl in this place. Then I’d be damned if he wouldn’t be smiling at me again.” As soon as she stepped into his dressing room that night, “he couldn’t take his eyes off her,” Joe remembers. “Man,” Elvis said to Sonny, “that’s Venus sitting down over there.”
Barbara and James picked a table in the center of the room, and when James got up, Barbara barely had time to look around before “Elvis swooped in and sat down next to me. He looked into my eyes and that was it! We were both in lust, or love, or whatever you want to call it. It was like a thunderbolt. He snuck a tiny pencil and piece of paper under the table for my number, and I had no problems writing it down. What girl wouldn’t have given him her number? He was the sexiest entertainer on the planet, and a beautiful soul. That was just too much to resist.”
Later that night, James wanted to make love, but Barbara’s heart wasn’t in it. She was back in that dressing room, reliving her conversation with Elvis. It seemed unreal. As a kid, she’d seen him on The Ed Sullivan Show. He was so free and alive, but her family was appalled at such shaking and swiveling, and when she got up and tried to move like he did, she was quickly sent to her room. It was too much to dream that she would meet him one day, let alone that he would want to be with her.
Meanwhile he was up in his new Imperial Suite, a blue-and-yellow penthouse that encompassed the entire thirtieth floor. When Joyce and Karen arrived, they found wall-to-wall guests, far more crowded than Joyce expected, though that was the norm according to Red. “There always were a lot of people up there . . . he wanted an audience of just people to talk, to unwind.” And, of course, on a typical night, “There was hundreds of girls.”
Sometimes he’d have other performers like Tom Jones or Andy Williams over, or just his own backup groups, the Imperials and the Sweet Inspirations, and they’d sing with him. One night, he put on a stack of 45s and asked Myrna Smith to dance. Elvis never flirted with black girls—he made up an excuse when he thought Diana Ross came on to him from the rolled-down window of her limousine—and this was just a friendly spin around the floor. Yet he was still just as uneasy at the idea of dancing as he had been at his parties back at Lauderdale Courts.
Myrna thought at first “that it