Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [329]
One person who wasn’t entertained was Linda Thompson. After Sheila had been alone in Vegas with Elvis for eight days, Linda found out about it, and as Shirley remembers, “Linda was so jealous of her that she had us all convinced that Sheila was a hooker. She told everybody that Joe had picked her up, and after he had paid for her, she wanted to be with Elvis.” Shirley actually believed it for a while and then learned better.
Elvis and Linda had a terrific row over Sheila on the phone during Sheila’s first stay, and it opened Sheila’s eyes to both the volatility and the importance of his relationship with her.
“I heard a tone coming out of him that was so guttural that I thought, ‘He must be fighting with Priscilla.’ I was in the bathroom and I stayed there, because I didn’t even want to believe that there was someone in his life who could make him this angry. She was just letting him have it, and he was explaining to her when he would be home and when she could come see him again, and it was very, very disturbing. He was saying, ‘You’ve always gotta do it, don’t you? You’ve always gotta twist the knife so that my gut can’t even breathe.’ He just got vehement. And that’s when I came to find out that Linda, who he let on was ‘just a girl,’ was very much a part of his life. That was a rude awakening for me.”
What puzzled Linda the most was how paradoxical Elvis was in terms of romance. On the one hand, she knew that he loved her immeasurably and that he was devoted to her emotionally. He took the time to articulate his feelings, saying, “I know that I haven’t been completely faithful to you. I know that you don’t understand a lot of the things that I do. But you have to know that you could never be with anyone who would love you more.”
And so they would remain in each other’s lives. But there would continue to be plenty of competition. Not only would Linda and Sheila pass each other on the moving sidewalk in the Las Vegas airport at one point, but when Sheila went on tour with him in March 1974, Elvis had Marty pick up Ann Pennington in Monroe, Louisiana, while someone else took the departing Sheila to the plane. For Ann, “I had a little ‘ouch’ about it, but it was like, ‘That’s the way it is.’ ”
After March, Sheila didn’t hear from him for months, understanding that she and Linda were “sort of running a horse race . . . we were neck and neck and then I fell behind.” And so she moved to Los Angeles and made no effort to get in touch with him. During the interim, Elvis reconciled with Linda, threw a twenty-third birthday party for her in May, and let her redecorate Graceland in a brilliant red color scheme, replacing the original blue.
Linda was the woman who best met his tricky combination of requirements—sexy, yet motherly, gentle but feisty, and perhaps most important, spiritual. Still, Elvis thought he hadn’t found exactly what he was looking for, and one night that spring, he took Larry Geller aside at the Monovale house. “I’ve got to meet someone, man. You know a lot of women. Fix me up.”
To Larry, it was preposterous. Elvis was the biggest sex symbol there was.
“I don’t know, Elvis,” Larry said.
But then he thought of Michelle Meyers, who booked rock groups for all of the clubs and knew every girl in town. Larry dialed the phone. “Oh, I know this girl, and she’d be great,” Michelle told him. That evening, Elvis sent one of the guys to pick her up and bring her to the house for a party. But when she came in the door, Elvis turned sharply to his friend.
“His eyes popped open, and