Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [328]
“He did this little dance. It was the, ‘We’re going to do it dance,’ his little mating call. He was uncomfortable with the beginning of it, so he’d walk on one side of the bed. As soon as he had a certain look on his face, he would turn away, and scratch his head, make sure the lights were right, and then pull off one of his shoes and then one of mine, and talk about the weather for five or six minutes. At the time, I thought it was just adorable, because I knew what was coming, so I would get a little wet.”
Despite all the women he’d been with, she was surprised that he was still shy at certain aspects of lovemaking, though he liked giving oral sex.
“He would start at my ankles, and then go up, and once he had his head in my muff, with his hands reaching up to my breasts, all of his shyness went right out the window. He made jokes, and he would come up and look me straight in the eyes.”
Because she was inexperienced, at first she wasn’t sure if she really had an orgasm. Elvis was a tender lover, but she couldn’t relax enough, she thought.
To help her through it, Elvis said an Indian wise man had told him that there was one way to find out for certain if a man had satisfied his woman.
“He said that if the lips on her face were cool, she’d had an orgasm, because all of the blood had rushed to her vagina. Once I was familiar with the story, he would make references to it. And then when I would be making the appropriate noises and sounds of ecstasy, he’d say, ‘Okay, I’ll see if I took care of my baby.’ ”
She didn’t want to disappoint him, so “a couple times, I was quick to wet my lips and breathe in. I didn’t want him to think he hadn’t done the job. Then one time I was getting ready to wet my lips, and before I knew it, I was in full-blown orgasm. I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ And he laughed so hard.”
With Sheila, he rarely asked for oral sex in return. Generally, he thought that’s what prostitutes were for, not girlfriends, though Sheila thought it had to do with the fact that he wasn’t circumcised. “He didn’t seem to want it. He was a giver and it didn’t stop at giving cars and jewelry—even sexually, he was a giver.”
They were good together, at least for a while, and Elvis seemed completely under her spell, bemused by her crooked smile and what he called her “bubble butt.”
However, their sexual appetites didn’t always match. She understood his rules, that “I was never to be a first-thing-in-the-morning kind of girl,” and that “there couldn’t be a natural odor to me anywhere.” But she hadn’t counted on the sleeping pills. One morning, she had douched, showered, powdered, puffed, dressed, and prettied to his expectations, and now it was Sheila who did the mating dance. First, she tickled his nose with a feather, but she watched in frustration as it rose and fell to the breath of slumber. Next, she took all his rings from the bedside table, put them on her own fingers and made tapping sounds, sitting right next to him on the bed.
“I didn’t want to get in trouble, but I wanted to play. I wanted to make love, and I really wanted him in me. But he didn’t wake up, and I was sitting there, sitting there, and sitting there.”
In his conscious moments, Elvis appreciated Sheila most of all because she made him laugh, and he found her naïveté fresh and disarming. He liked to roll her middle name, “Marie,” together with her first, so it came out as a mush of sound—“Sheila M’ree”—but he also had several nicknames for her based on her haircut. One was “Dennis,” for “Dennis, the Menace,” and the second was “Chicken Head.” The latter was reminiscent of what he’d said to actress Goldie Hawn when he met her while taping the ’68 special: “He walked up to me and he tousled my hair and he said, ‘You look like a chicken that’s just been hatched.’ ” Shirley Dieu understood that the concept of an intelligent girl who acted like a ditz was a turn-on for him.
“That’s how Sheila was,