Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [313]
In her autobiography, Cybill Disobedience, she described a weekend in Palm Springs:
“The house was luxurious in a rental sort of way, sprawling and devoid of personal taste. Everything had a metallic glow. All the King’s men . . . spent the afternoon competing to see who could make the biggest splash into a murky swimming pool. The guys raced dune buggies three or four abreast while shouting into walkie-talkies, or sat around a long table with a thick top of beveled glass, eating their favorite deep-fried sandwiches.”
Today, she sees that she and Elvis actually had a lot in common, that fame and beauty “can cause you to be emotionally underdeveloped. People do things for you. There were a lot of times . . . where I just didn’t get a chance to grow and learn.”
But in 1972, she simply couldn’t get over the control. Elvis wanted to take her shopping—he didn’t like her jeans and tie-dyed mirrored vest—and he demanded she ditch Bogdanovich, who continued to pursue her. She chose to be with Peter, and when Elvis showed up on an unexpected late-night visit, “I don’t think it had sunk in that I had already ended it.”
What finished them was the drugs. In a replay of Joyce Bova’s experience, Elvis insisted that Cybill join him in his nightly ritual of sleeping medication. “He said, ‘Here, take these,’ and he had pills in his hands. I said, ‘Aren’t you going to take some of them?’ And he said, ‘Well, I’ve already had mine.’ He was almost already asleep, and I went and flushed them down the toilet, returned his emerald-and-diamond ring, and just said, ‘Thank you, but I can’t.’ ”
Though brief, their sex life ran the gamut. In an interview with E! television, she labeled him “a wonderful lover, very sexy,” but later spoke of his bumbling technique. “Let’s put it this way: I think before I met him he was [sexually] conservative, trapped in a stupid macho thing.” Her much-quoted declaration that it was she who taught him oral sex brought hoots of derision from other of his lovers, who knew that by the time Cybill arrived “it was just a shuttle—one came in the door as another was flown back to Vegas.”
That’s precisely what happened when Elvis opened there on July 31, 1972. During his three days of rehearsals, he flew Linda to Los Angeles and then brought her to the Hilton for most of his engagement. As soon as she left, Cybill came in. “The Elvis that I got to know in Memphis was very different than the Elvis that I got to know in Las Vegas. He was unavailable in a way. And then years later, I would find out he had two other women there at the same time.”
Elvis followed Raquel Welch into the Las Vegas Hilton showroom that summer, and she had someone call the Colonel to ask if she could come see the show. He arranged for her to sit in Elvis’s booth, and she sat there agog at what she terms his third transformation. Despite costumer Bill Belew’s best intentions, Raquel thought “Elvis looked almost like Liberace or one of those apparitions, dressed all in white, with rings on every finger.”
Reviewers noted that he seemed more subdued during his engagement and spent less time interacting with the audience between songs. When Raquel went to his dressing room after the show, “he was very sweet, very nice, and he showed me all his jewelry.” But he didn’t seem to be really happy, and she couldn’t get the show out of her mind. “He had a whole basket of blue scarves, and he must have thrown fifty of them into the audience. It was so carnival. He was almost like a windup toy.”
His most devoted fans, including Robin Rosaaen of San Jose, California, saw him otherwise. “Once he was onstage, it was like somebody flipped a switch. Just pure sex energy filled that showroom.” Robin had been attending all of Elvis’s Vegas engagements since 1970, and in 1972, he gave her the first of eight kisses and thirteen scarves she would receive over seventy-two shows in six and a half years. “Elvis was like a drug,” she says. “Once you saw him, you had to see him again.”
She earned that first kiss by holding up an I WANT YOUR BODY