Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [310]
Things were slipping away from him in triplicate now, not just in singles or in pairs. The Colonel had rewritten his management contract to give himself a bigger cut of Elvis’s live performances, even as he would soon renegotiate his client’s Vegas contract for more money: $130,000 a week for the next two engagements, and $150,000 a week for the following three. And Priscilla, in town for the close of his run that February 23, 1972, had something she wanted to formalize with him, too: In between shows, she told him she was involved with Mike Stone.
He already knew for certain now, knew it when he sent Red down to the hotel’s Italian restaurant to bring her up to the suite. But hearing it from her own lips outraged him. He told her she was crazy, that she had everything a woman could want. But she didn’t back down. In fact, she wanted a divorce.
Elvis had Sherry Williams in town for consolation. But he’d had two women walk out of his life within a matter of hours, and now he did the unimaginable: He raped his wife.
Priscilla never termed it “rape,” but she told Red’s wife, Pat, that Elvis forced her to have sex. As she wrote in her memoir, Elvis and Me, “He grabbed me and forcefully made love to me. It was uncomfortable and unlike any other time he’d ever made love to me before, and he explained, ‘This is how a real man makes love to his woman.’ ”
After the second show, he called all the guys in and said, “Another man has taken my wife.” He was seething, but a river of sadness ran through him, too. When somebody said, “I thought you wanted to get rid of her,” his voice was shaky. “Not that way, man.”
“It wasn’t so much that she was having an affair,” Sonny says. “It was that she was going to actually leave him for Mike. If Elvis hadn’t known Stone, it wouldn’t have been as bad for him.”
“Elvis was very upset about the divorce,” seconds Joe. “Here he is, the sex symbol of the world, and he’s losing his wife to another man. It was really an ego killer for him. He wouldn’t admit that to us, but we all knew it was hurting him, and he was affected tremendously by it.”
He found solace with Barbara Leigh, who listened as “he cursed Priscilla and Mike on a daily basis, since no one leaves the King. But that was good—it helped him process the hurt and the embarrassment of being left.”
When Marty went out to California on business in March, Elvis was still coming to grips with it. He said he had a “problem,” that Priscilla was leaving him. He’d just been to the Monovale house and found she had moved out.
“I’m sorry, man,” Marty said.
“What am I going to do?”
“Let me ask you a question. Are you going to change?”
“Hell, no. I ain’t doing that for nobody.”
For his next recording session, later in March, he chose songs of heartbreak and regret: “Separate Ways,” and “Always on My Mind.” He poured himself into his work, including a second documentary film, Elvis on Tour.
After a period in the early 1970s in which he lost his discipline in some of the Vegas shows, “lying down on stage and talking into the mike and laughing,” Joe Moscheo remembers, Elvis revitalized himself for the fifteen-city tour and filming. A young Martin Scorsese supervised the montage editing.
While Elvis on Tour would share a Golden Globe award with Walls of Fire as the best feature documentary, some critics believed it lifted no veils on Elvis’s private life. But a posthumous theatrical release, This Is Elvis, contained footage which was originally shot for the earlier documentary. When Elvis is asked in the limousine if he saw the Apollo 16 rocket launch, he implies he was too busy to see it: “I was buried in a beaver.” And in a later scene from Greensboro, North Carolina, Elvis references another sexual episode to Jerry.
“You know that girl I was with last night?”
“The dog?”
“Oh, man,” Elvis says. “She gave great head, boy . . . Hey, Joe, that chick last night gave the greatest head I ever had in my life.” The last line was later overdubbed for a TV and home video version, euphemistically becoming