Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [299]
Around this same time he started incorporating EP into 14-karat gold, goggle-shaped eyeglasses designed by Dennis Roberts and made up to his prescription at Roberts’ Optique Boutique on Sunset Boulevard. But that wasn’t enough. He wanted something uniquely Elvis, not just for himself, but also for the guys—something that showed they were a group, his group, exclusive and powerful.
He was on a flight with Priscilla one day when together they began sketching out the design for a 14-karat gold charm with the letters TCB laid atop a zigzag lightning bolt: “Taking Care of Business—in a flash.” He took the design to Schwartz and Ableser jewelers in Beverly Hills, to be made into pendants, and that fall, he picked up the first two dozen on gold chains. In time, he would add TLC, or “Tender Loving Care,” pendants for the ladies. Patti Parry would treasure hers like nothing else: “My TLC has never been off my neck since he gave it to me. I clean it, and I had it reinforced, but it’s going with me, you know?” Soon, the TCB symbol would appear on his eyeglasses, too.
On December 19, 1970, Vernon sat out in his office at Graceland, tallying up his son’s recent expenses, and then walked in the house to take Elvis to task. On top of all the guns and jewelry and the ten Mercedes he had bought as gifts, including one for Vernon himself, Elvis had offered to pay for Sonny’s wedding. Vernon told him it had to stop. They had a terrific fight, Priscilla joining in to support her father-in-law’s point of view.
Elvis didn’t feel well—he was taking penicillin for an eye infection—and now outraged that the very people who lived large off his money would try to dictate how he spent it, he stormed out of the house and sped off, ending up at the airport. There he did something he had never done before in his life: He boarded a commercial airliner by himself and left the city without anyone knowing where he was or where he was going.
Though he hadn’t seen Joyce Bova since August, when she slammed the door on the penthouse suite in Vegas, Elvis decided he had to see her and her twin, Janice. He wasn’t sure why, exactly, but unconsciously he seemed to feel Joyce was the only one who could sympathize with his plight and offer relief.
“There are two reasons for Elvis to hunger for that sort of connectivity with the twinned twins,” says Peter O. Whitmer. “First, there are psychological phenomenon so odd to a singleton that only another twin would understand with unconditional regard and agreement. Second, it undoubtedly transported him back to an emotional state that was far more static than the one he was actually in.”
An easy analogy conjures three survivors reunited after a terrible accident. If two were still a pair, and the third had lost his “other” in the tragedy, no one could understand that phenomenon better.
For Elvis, going to see Joyce “was a temporary fix, a Band-Aid, that must have soothed him from the inside out,” in Whitmer’s view. To even envision any kind of “reunion” with them might have been the most healing phenomenon ever for him. Yet as they were the “united” ones, he was still somewhat an outsider to them, ever to remain so.
When his plane landed in the nation’s capital, Elvis arranged for Liberty Limousine Service to take him to the Hotel Washington, where he registered as Jon Burrows, using his own address in Memphis. However, he had thrown away Joyce’s telephone number after their altercation at the International that night, and now he didn’t know how to find her, either at home or at work through government listings. Realizing he had no way to locate her alone (“He couldn’t take care of himself, so I don’t know how he got here on an airplane,” Joyce says), he checked out of the hotel, and went back to the airport.
There he booked a flight to Dallas, where his stewardess was based. But in arranging for his ticket, he got into a hassle with the agent,