Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [324]
In Lamar’s view, if it hadn’t been for Linda and the group, Elvis would have died three years earlier. He constantly had to be rescued from choking on his food—drugs numb the nerves in the throat that control the swallowing reflex—and one time Linda rushed to call Joe when Elvis turned blue with a peach pit stuck in his throat. Being with him was “like being in a firehouse,” Lamar says. “You never knew when the alarm was going to go off.”
During that Vegas engagement, Elvis became better acquainted with twenty-three-year-old Ann Pennington, a model-actress and future Playboy Playmate who lived in L.A. Her older sister, Janice, was one of the girls on The Price Is Right, a game show that Elvis often watched with Linda in the hospital. He’d met both of the Penningtons earlier that fall at the Hillcrest house. They shared the same Beverly Hills dentist, Max Shapiro, who telephoned Ann and said Elvis was going through a rough patch after his divorce and needed to meet some nice girls. Would they see him? Ann was more of a Beatles fan, and begged off, but Janice had always liked his music, and though engaged, went to the house one evening. The next day she called her sister and said Ann had to meet him, that Elvis was “the most amazing, kind, sweet southern gentleman.”
When Ann finally went over, Joe opened the door and she saw Elvis sitting directly in front of her on the couch in a green leisure suit. “He looked, and he got up, and all of a sudden, I went, ‘Oh, Geez. Wow!’ He was just charming and lovely, and we had a great time.”
The beautiful blonde had a three-year-old daughter, Jessica, but Elvis was already interested in her by the time he found out she was a mother. When he did, “He was like, ‘Oh, my God!,’ and he told me about his block.” The first time he heard her call her daughter “Jessie,” he said, “That’s my twin’s name.” Soon he was comfortable enough with the situation that they bathed Jessie and Lisa together in the tub, and he played with Ann’s daughter and spoiled her with candy just the way he did his own child. Then when they finally got around to intimacy, and he saw that “Annie Pie,” as he affectionately nicknamed her, still excited him, he was able to push his phobia from his mind.
From the beginning he found the soulful Ann, with her big, expressive eyes, easy to be around, and he could level with her. “I’m so lonely, Annie,” he would say, and sit on the bed and play “Blue Spanish Eyes” for her on his guitar. She knew about loneliness. She’d recently moved to L.A. from San Diego and didn’t know many people other than her sister. And so she was eager to listen to all his old escapades, brag on his karate technique, and appreciate the Charles Boyer album he was currently obsessed with, particularly the Frenchman’s heavily accented recitation of “Where Does Love Go (When It Leaves the Heart).”
It was a question he asked himself over and over. When Anita called to let him know about her father’s death, he talked so “slow and draggy and not like his effervescent self, the way I remembered him.” But he said, “Little, get a pen and paper. I want you to write this poem down. Verbatim. Take a deep breath.” She did what he said, right down to the inhale. “Now read it back to me, Little,” he said. “Don’t ever forget it.”
There, with Ann, he did virtually the same thing. “Listen to this, Annie Pie,” he’d say to her. “Aren’t these just the most romantic words you’ve ever heard?”
“There was an awful lot of feeling there,” she says of the relationship. “My experience with him was nothing but fun and sweetness.” They read his books, and she introduced him to one he loved called Lessons in Truth that her mother had given her when she was a teenager. They just had such great conversations, and while she saw “the drug thing” on a couple of occasions, it didn’t dominate their time together.
One night in Vegas, when they were sitting around on bar stools