Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [315]
“He would ask a direct question at a particular moment when something was happening, but we never sat down and talked about any of Elvis’s health problems or what needed to be done. It seemed like his main concern was how many shows we could get in that year.”
One reason Elvis was excited about the satellite show was what it would say about his “potency,” particularly to Priscilla, whose approval he still sought and needed. Dr. Nick remembers that he always had tremendous performance anxiety before any of the shows, that he was “a basket case . . . he’d worry whether he was going to be 100 percent, and want something for his nerves, some Ritalin or amphetamines.” If he could perform to most of the planet on his own, without any kind of artifice, it would free him. He could boast he didn’t need Priscilla, he didn’t need drugs, he didn’t need anything. He’d even take off his heavy, jeweled cape and throw it in the audience, a symbolic rebirth.
Elvis also hoped the “Aloha” special would impress his new girlfriend. Already he could tell Linda was different from the rest. She was almost always by his side, adored him beyond description, and didn’t try to change him, other than to try to temper the drugs. When she went to Dr. Nick and asked him how she could get Elvis off pills, he advised her to simply leave. Instead, she chose to stay.
From the outset, she realized he was a paradoxical man, and that theirs would be a complex relationship that would both exceed and fall short of normal expectations. She wanted to give him plenty of room to explore it and make it whatever he wanted.
“I think it’s wonderful if you can be all things to each other, and he and I were. He called me ‘Mommy,’ and I was like his mother at times, and he was like my father at times, and we were like children, like brother and sister. And we were like lovers at times. That’s a full rich relationship when you can do that.”
But her most constant roles were caregiver, nurse, and hand holder. The first time he took her to Vegas, Elvis passed out with food in his mouth and started to choke. Linda cleared it out of his throat and turned him on his side to get him breathing again. “I felt a responsibility to his mother to take care of him, and actually to the world, too, because so many people loved him.”
She had always felt maternal, and “he was like my little boy.” Her nickname for him was “Buntin’,” short for baby bunting, after the popular nursery rhyme and lullaby. Elvis called her “Ariadne,” for three-year-old Ariadne Pennington, a character in his 1962 film Follow That Dream.
“We both just naturally talked baby talk. That was a big part of our relationship.” She was the only girlfriend who truly understood the secret language and used it. A Mailgram she sent him when he was away in California demonstrates her prowess:
Baby gullion, you are just a little fella. Little fellas need lots of butch, ducklin’, and iddytream . . . Grit. Chock. Chock. Shake. Rattle. Roll. Hmmmmm . . . Hit. Hit. Pinch. Bite. Hurt. Grit. Whew. My baby don’t care for rings . . . Pablum lullion (in or out of the hospital). P.S. Foxhugh [the poodle] will bite sooties if you say iddytream again. Grit. Grit. [Signed] Ariadne Pennington
The two rarely fought. Linda even tolerated Elvis seeing other women when she wasn’t around, though for the first year and a half, he was largely faithful. When he did fool around, “it hurt her,” Marty Lacker saw. “But her attitude was, ‘What am I going to do about it? Say, “Hey, Elvis, you can’t do that or I’m going to leave?” He would have said, ‘Adios.’ ”
For Christmas that first year, Elvis gave her what all grown-up girls want, a fur coat. And all year round, she gave him what he wanted, too—she allowed him to regress to an infantile state, to start the full journey back to Gladys.
The irony was that the more childlike Elvis became, the more he treated Lisa Marie as an adult, showering her with the same gifts he gave