Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [337]
At another time in his life, they might have made it work. She cared about him, and promised him she would always be there for him whenever he needed her. While she would see other men, she took no serious boyfriend, as he had asked. But then Elvis found out she’d been involved with black actor-football star Fred Williamson, and while it preceded their own relationship, he pulled the plug, just as he had on Joan Blackman when he heard she’d dated a black man, too.
“He wasn’t a racist person,” Mindi clarifies. “That’s just the way he was raised.” And so, she continued to be a part of his support team, if only by phone. The one thing she didn’t miss was the touring, which she considered both grueling and boring.
Sheila, who didn’t like the road, either, went back on tour with him in June 1975, and found it even more intolerable than before. She knew he was tired of playing the same towns over and over, that he needed the lift of a European engagement or something stimulating to break the routine. But she also suspected that a lot of his moodiness was due to what was in his black bag of pharmaceuticals, which she was in charge of carrying. Elvis was so irritable that the slightest thing set him off. He had a huge tantrum in Mobile on June 2, when he found she didn’t have her slippers. Then when she announced she needed to go home for a mammogram, she could feel the heat coming off of him at the breakfast table.
“I never would dare say, ‘What’s the matter, honey?’ But his pajama sleeve caught the creamer and tipped it over, and then he cleared the whole table with his arm, and my scrambled eggs, too, and he said, ‘You and your fuckin’ tumor!’ He didn’t want me to go, but I needed the rest. One day with Elvis was like five with anybody else.”
Gone were the days when they’d check into some crummy motel on the road and make love in the afternoons. Everybody on tour had known about it, because after Elvis’s daily shot of Valium, he’d get so randy that “while all the guys were bringing things in, I had to get in my jammies.”
Now Joe was telling her to “get out of this mess,” and Ann Pennington, who had become her friend through another girl in L.A., was trying to introduce her to new people. That July after Elvis had recuperated from a cosmetic eye procedure he’d had in mid-June, Sheila was supposed to meet him in Uniondale, New York. But she didn’t want to go. In fact, she’d met actor James Caan through Ann, and had already committed to marry him. Nobody wanted to tell Elvis just yet, so they made up a story that she couldn’t fly due to an ear infection.
Determined to have Sheila with him, Elvis told her he’d send a low-flying plane for her. But when she begged off again, he angrily said he would call when he got home. After that, he could barely contain his rage, even onstage. In Uniondale, on July 19, he threw a guitar into the crowd and yelled, “Whoever got the guitar can keep the damned thing—I don’t need it anyway.”
The following night, in Norfolk, Virginia, he was still out of control, repeating crude sexual remarks about Kathy Westmoreland that he had made in other cities. (“She will take affection from anybody, any place, any time. In fact, she gets it from the whole band.”) After that, he raised eyebrows saying he smelled green peppers and onions, and that the Sweet Inspirations “had probably been eating catfish.” Finally, a few days later, he accidentally shot Dr. Nick in an Asheville, North Carolina, hotel room, though the bullet, which ricocheted off a chair and hit the physician in the chest, did no real damage.
Taking Sheila’s place that tour was Diana Goodman, the reigning Miss Georgia USA, who Elvis picked out of a tour group at the Graceland gates. In some of their photographs, the curvaceous blonde appears dazed, as if the routine of plane, limo, hotel, show—and dealing with a highly unpredictable host—was a nightmare of unimaginable proportions. Their relationship would disintegrate at tour’s