Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [312]
Earlier that month, Elvis had begun seeing twenty-two-year-old Linda Thompson. She would become not only the most important of his postdivorce girlfriends, but he would also build a stronger and deeper bond with her than he’d ever had with Priscilla. She was his best hope yet for a long-lasting and meaningful relationship with a woman.
Predictably, Linda was the winner of a beauty queen title—Miss Tennessee Universe, representing the state in the Miss Universe pageant—but she did not precisely fall in line with his ideal type, despite her brown eyes. At five foot nine, she was tall, not petite, and refused to darken her long, blondish mane to make Elvis happy. Like Joyce Bova and June Juanico before her, she was an independent thinker. Furthermore, she was educated, having attended Memphis State. But she was a virgin.
Most of all, she would nurture him, seeing that “Elvis needed more love and care than anybody I ever met, probably more than anyone in this world, because of who he was and what he had done.” She found him “intensely lonely at heart.”
One day Linda was having lunch at a Memphis restaurant with Jeanne LeMay, a former Miss Rhode Island USA who had shared a hotel room with Linda at the Miss USA pageant in Puerto Rico. They had become instant friends, and after the pageant, Jeanne moved to Memphis to live with Linda, the two thinking they might become flight attendants together. That day at lunch, Linda ran into an acquaintance, Bill Browder, who worked in record promotion and would later become a country singer known as T. G. Sheppard. He invited the two of them to Elvis’s movie marathon at the Memphian that night, July 6.
“I thought Elvis was still married,” Linda remembers, “so I didn’t have any kind of designs on him. But I found out he wasn’t when I got to the theater.”
It was George Klein who actually introduced the two. Elvis appreciated her southern girl beauty and personality, as well as her sense of humor, and asked her to come back the following night.
When Linda then left for three weeks on a family vacation, Elvis turned to another Memphis belle, Cybill Shepherd, the 1966 Miss Teenage Memphis and later the national Model of the Year. Cybill had just made a terrific splash as Jacy Farrow, the small-town Texas temptress in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show. Elvis didn’t know the classically beautiful twenty-three-year-old was involved with the older director and that she had broken up his marriage. But her provocative scenes in the film reminded him of his sexual awakening with real-life Texas beauties on the Hayride.
He had George call her when she was home from New York, and they followed the usual M.O.: Would Cybill like to come to the Memphian?
“I said, ‘Well, I’ll come and meet him, but I want to bring my best friend, and my brother, and his best friend.’ ”
When they arrived, Elvis wasn’t there yet, and she tried to concentrate on the movie until he made his grand entrance, everybody to the right of her getting up and moving one seat down. “He was still looking fabulous. And he smelled great.” They dated a month, and “if he had smelled bad, it probably would have ended sooner.” Things got rolling when he invited her to Graceland for chicken-fried steak, a meal after Jacy’s heart.
Just as Elvis and Priscilla had fallen in love with myths, he and Cybill were attracted to each other for all the wrong reasons. He was entranced with a celluloid image that reminded him of his youth, and she had grown up in Memphis hoping to catch sight of the hometown boy who became a god.
If Cybill had been interested enough in Elvis, Linda Thompson might never have been anything but a two-night date. But Cybill, though fourteen years Elvis’s junior, ran in far more sophisticated circles, and as with Peggy Lipton, it doomed them from the start. Still, they gave it a try. But like so many women before her, Cybill found