Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [325]
But another night, he’d had a couple of drinks, which Ann realized was a rarity for him, and she woke up in the middle of the night freezing in her negligee. Suddenly, she realized she was soaked, but she just moved over to the edge of the bed and stayed there.
“When he got up, he was mortified. He said, ‘Oh, my God, Annie Pie, Annie Pie, oh, my God, I’m so sorry. Why didn’t you wake me?’ Then we were sitting out with the guys, and he said, ‘I peed all over the bed. Do you believe it? Poor thing! She was huddled in a little corner there. She didn’t say a word.’ ” He didn’t seem embarrassed to talk about it, but after the maids came up and carried the mattress out of the suite, nobody said anything else about it.
When Linda found out about Ann, she didn’t think that he was really with her, but still, “I felt it was a violation of our relationship, and certainly something he wouldn’t have tolerated.” She’d had an inkling he was with other people now and then: Sherry Williams, for example, came along to Palm Springs with the group, and then when Linda was away with a girlfriend, Sherry spent a week at Graceland. “I wondered, ‘What’s this all about?’ I didn’t realize that Elvis was seeing other women when he was with Linda.” But mostly Elvis just wanted company. “We did a lot of things, theater, karate, shopping. . . . Basically, I think he wanted someone to stay with him while she was gone. However, it was one of the more intimate times I had with him.”
Then there was a dalliance with Nanette Kuklish, a broadcast newswoman who went to Vegas “on a mission to meet Elvis Presley, and I wasn’t going to give up.” He came on to her twice, the second time in Linda’s presence: “She was sitting right next to him. His head was turned in my direction as we were talking, flirting, and laughing . . . we saw each other a week later at his home in Holmby Hills.”
“Elvis wanted to be happy,” Marty saw. “He just didn’t know how to do it. He felt it was too late for him to find happiness. He could have found it with Linda. But instead of concentrating on that, he looked back at Priscilla and thought, ‘Maybe I’m not cut out to be married.’ ”
For Linda, it was past disillusioning, as the two had been together “literally twenty-four hours a day for the first year that we were together,” and within two weeks of meeting her, Elvis told her he was in love and wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. But as she grew and matured, she also became more aware of her own needs, and what Elvis could and could not give her.
“I think the timing was bad,” Linda assesses. “Not to take away from the magnitude of it, but I was young and he was just coming out of a marriage. It was a transitional kind of relationship, even though it lasted well beyond the transitional years. We planned to be married, and then the time just kind of passed us.”
Jo Smith remembers how crazy Elvis had been about Linda: “She had a peach-colored outfit, and when she wore it, he would bite at her. He would be talking, and as she passed by, he’d go, ‘And so and so . . . gnaw-gnaw-gnaw-hhhhnnnnhhhhh.’ Like a shark or something.”
But what started out as marathon lovemaking sessions in Las Vegas dwindled down to “once a year” sex and lifesaving heroics.
It wasn’t so much that he was truly impotent, though there were times when the drugs rendered him so. “We discussed sexual things,” Dr. Nick reports, “and I think more than anything else he got preoccupied with having more of a mother figure around him to take care of him. I don’t think it was because he couldn’t perform. I just think that’s what he was interested in.”
And so he continued to hit on other girls right in front of Linda, including twenty-one-year-old Sheila Ryan, who arrived in Vegas at roughly the same time as Ann Pennington. Joe, who thought Sheila was gorgeous and had tried to date