Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [326]
“I had grape juice running down my face. He flung it from about fifteen feet away, and I mean, it was an amazing shot! I thought it had to be a mistake, because nobody would do that. But Joe was laughing, and Elvis was laughing, kneeling down and saying, ‘Oh, I’m sorry’ over and over, and Linda was so nervous in her yellow jersey dress that it turned a different color from under her arm down to her waist.”
When Elvis looked up at her, Sheila finally realized that Elvis had actually thrown the grape on purpose, so she wasn’t surprised when Joe was on the phone, having dialed her every few minutes for two days while she was changing apartments: “Where in the heck have you been? My boss likes you and wants to see you.”
She was so angelic-looking, she could have passed for a fourteen-year-old. And though she’d been on the cover of Playboy magazine just that previous October, she was a virgin, a Catholic girl from the burbs of Chicago, Franklin Park. For some reason she couldn’t quite figure out—she had self-esteem issues, as well as what would later be diagnosed as Asperger syndrome—men flocked at her feet. She’d left home fleeing from a crazy boyfriend, intending to go to L.A. But she got only as far as Las Vegas in her worn-out Volvo and wasn’t sure what was next.
Sheila was thinking about all that as she rode up the elevator to Elvis’s suite between shows. He gave her a hug, and “he was dripping wet with sweat, and he had a white towel, and the towel was dripping wet, and he had no qualms about just sweating all over me.”
Immediately, he made a little dig about the fact that she was wearing slacks, but they were the best things she owned. To Sheila, who would be Elvis’s only hippie girlfriend, slacks meant dressing up—normally she wore jeans with holes in them—and now she felt sheepish. “They’re Sir For Her,” she said defensively, meaning they were a good brand.
“Why do you dress like a man?” he continued. She looked at his stage outfit, which reminded her of a Dalmatian, and then she gave it right back to him.
“Does Cruella know you have her cape tonight?”
He let out a hearty laugh. He liked it that she was capable of such quick and funny repartee, and he admired her spunk. But she could see he was even more nervous than she was, and that a girl in a pair of slacks, with her hair stuck flat to her head, wasn’t going to do it for him.
Still, she got in a snit when he ordered her to put on some eyeliner. And when he said, “Your bathroom is over there,” she thought, “Oh, it’s my bathroom, is it?” She was just a little bit miffed, but in a fun sort of way, and as she made her beeline, she flipped him off, but in the front so he couldn’t see.
“And don’t sass me, either,” he called out. Sheila shook her head. How did he do that?
In the bathroom, she rummaged around and did the best she could with the little makeup she had in her bag, and when she reappeared, he stunned her. “Do you believe in love at first sight?” he asked.
Sheila was certainly attracted to him, but she didn’t know whether it was love, and she wouldn’t decide for seven months. She would be his last significant girlfriend. But at that point, all she knew for certain was that Elvis had made it clear how he felt. And that “once you are on the other side of that black velvet curtain, life is never the same.”
They ate dinner in the bedroom after the second show, and then he moved near the platform bed and sat cross-legged on the floor. People always threw all kinds of odd things on the stage to him, and this night, he brought back a baby’s bib, a plastic fireman’s hat, and a necklace with a cross on it made of gold twigs, with the initials EP and a star set into the bars of the cross.
Since he hated being called “The King,” he gave her the necklace.