Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [303]
But now Elvis had turned Joyce into the Priscilla of old, with the same bouffant hair and the eye makeup, and she was mistaken for her and beseeched for autographs more than ever. As with Priscilla, he also gave her pills to sleep, getting Joyce hooked on Placidyls. She was worried about herself, but she was more worried about him, about what all those books were doing to him.
“I have a serious message for the world,” he told her. “I have powers, Joyce, that I don’t go bragging about. I could announce them to the world.”
“Why don’t you?” she asked.
“People aren’t ready for me to announce that yet.”
When Elvis started messianic talk like that around Dr. Nick, the physician thought it was more of a game, “a conversation piece, something he would do to entertain himself and others.” A couple of the guys thought Elvis really believed he could heal people. But Dr. Nick was sometimes there when he’d do the laying on of hands: “He’d wink at you, like, ‘I really don’t believe in all of this, but I’m going through the motions and saying these things.’ ”
Whether or not he had “powers,” he was a master planner at covering his tracks. That January, in Vegas, he was particularly adept, bringing Sherry Williams in as soon as Joyce flew out. She spent most of the month of February with him there, where he gave her a TLC pendant. He also shared the A & D ointment he used to keep his lips soft, because “we’d kiss so passionately that I’d get the worst razor burn on my cheeks. It hurt so much, but I loved it.” He never forced any drugs on her and paid off her car when she refused to let him buy her a new one. “He was a huge impact on my life, all positive and fun. Nothing he ever said or did was negative toward me in any way.”
When still other girls came in, Sherry stayed in his suite on the twenty-ninth floor. “I had very mixed feelings about it . . . for a sheltered, eighteen-year-old girl. If it wasn’t me, it was going to be someone else, so I rationalized it.” At first, she didn’t know about the other girls he had there at the same time. She was always told it was Priscilla. “I was very naïve. But I don’t begrudge him for that. If anybody could get away with it, it was Elvis!”
She would go back in August and then again when he returned to Vegas the following year. All together, she saw more than fifty of his shows. One time he sang “Just Pretend” and pointed over to her booth. Another time, he sang one of their special songs for her, Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “Until It’s Time for You to Go,” a lover’s ballad about an affair that can never grow into a real relationship.
He was still thinking about Ann-Margret, who was wrestling with her own demons now. Suffering from depression, she was hurtful to her husband and her mother, and her social drinking had slipped into alcoholism. Seeing Elvis at her shows, sitting in the back booth, or coming onstage, doing a knee slide and stopping just at her feet, didn’t help.
That February 1971 she came into Vegas a few days early for her engagement, and Elvis invited her and Roger to a party at his suite, where he told her to stand perfectly still, and then demonstrated karate chops all around her face to show off his prowess. She knew that “a mistake of a mere millimeter could kill me, injure me severely, at the least. But I trusted him implicitly.” Then she felt a breeze as he reeled off several punches. When he finished, he shook his head.
“You know, you’re crazy,” he told her, his voice full of so many emotions.
She smiled. “So are you.”
Before long, he’d accidentally break another guest’s ankle with a karate kick and, in the recording studio, send a gun flying out of Red’s hand and straight through Chip Young’s handmade guitar.
In the middle of March Priscilla flew to California to supervise the continuing redecoration of the Monovale house, while Elvis went to Nashville to meet Felton Jarvis at RCA’s Studio B. Felton needed a lot from him this time—a pop album, a holiday LP, a gospel