Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [306]
Two of Peggy’s actress friends, Janet and Shelly, were seeing him at the same time and suggested she meet him, even as they warned her that he was damaged and fragile. Something about him fascinated her—she had idolized him growing up and called him “the sacred monster of rock and roll.”
Joe placed the call, and in July 1971 Elvis got on the phone and invited her to his first engagement at Del Webb’s Sahara Tahoe at Lake Tahoe, Nevada.
“He kissed like a god,” Lipton wrote in her 2005 memoir, Breathing Out, “but that was about it. He didn’t feel like a man next to me—more like a boy who’d never matured.”
Elvis came for her in a private plane, a Bach 111 twin-engine jet he’d chartered with a full-time pilot to get over his fear of flying. From the moment she stepped aboard, she knew it was a mistake: “Sitting in the cabin in full white regalia complete with sunglasses, rings, and rows of gold chains . . . Elvis looked like an action figure of himself.”
He immediately offered her jewelry from a myriad of blue cases, which put her off, as it seemed too practiced. But she accepted a square ring with little diamonds, rubies, and sapphires “that you could move around to form any letter.” The one he gave her had a P on it, and she didn’t know if he meant it for “Presley” or “Peggy.” But he was funny and charming, and she was surprised to find him “smart and considerably savvy, despite his hillbilly ways.” All the same, he was just too otherworldly and theatrical. What in hell was she doing there?
She’d brought along cocaine to get through it, and after they rolled around on the bed in heavy petting, they made love. “Or tried to,” she wrote. “Elvis knew he was sexy; he just wasn’t up to sex. Not that he wasn’t built, but with me, at least, he was virtually impotent. . . . When he couldn’t consummate it, he became embarrassed and went into the bathroom. I knew he felt badly, because he left me a poem scrawled on a torn-off scrap of paper on my pillow.”
After his show, they tried again, but then they gave up. He had too many drugs in him to perform, and then each morning, a doctor came and gave him a shot to help him sleep. He wanted her to have one, too. But it scared her. “Had I taken the shot, I’m sure I would have either died or passed out for days. These were heavy chemical cocktails, and Elvis was seriously into them.”
It was then she realized that the prerequisite for being with him was to get as stoned as he was. And all she wanted to do was run. One terrifying night, loaded up on his pharmaceutical escort to slumber, Elvis fell into a heavy stupor and woke up violently gagging and choking. Peggy pulled him into a sitting position, but he continued to struggle.
“Oh, my God, I thought, he’s going to choke to death,” Lipton wrote. “I punched him firmly on the back and he made a final heave. I frantically turned on the light. He was white as a sheet but still breathing. In his lap, all over his silk pajamas, was vomit filled with . . . maybe fifty or seventy-five capsules and pills of every description . . . along with the contents of last night’s meal.” At the apex of the crisis, “He called for his mother. He sat there like a baby, wailing for her. I cleaned him up and held him until he fell back to sleep . . . while the sun tried desperately to enter the curtained and darkened bedroom.”
After that, she quit taking his calls. The way he lived was just too frightening, and besides, she had enough problems trying to curtail her own cocaine use. “I wasn’t going to be able to save him—nobody was.”
There were other close calls about the same time. During the Tahoe engagement, he picked up a teenage girl named Page Peterson who sat in the second row with her mother. She wore no makeup and was precisely the sort of nondrinking, nonsmoking innocent that Elvis couldn’t resist. Sonny brought