Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [342]
Suddenly, the door opened, and there he was, all in black, a leather coat with a fake fur collar covering a roomy sweat suit, a damp towel setting it off. At that moment, all of Tanya’s brashness melted like a Dreamsicle in the Vegas sun.
“It was like the parting of the Red Sea. I was sitting down, of course, and he looked like he was about fourteen or fifteen feet tall. He came right over and said, ‘Lamar, get up,’ and you’ve never seen three hundred pounds move so quick. Elvis just plopped right down in front of me and got about two inches from my face and said, ‘So how you doin’?’ I said, ‘I’m just fine. How are you?’ I didn’t flinch a bit. Inside I was just jumpin’, but I didn’t want him to know that.”
They talked a little bit about music—Glen had told Elvis that Tanya patterned herself after him some—but then things got personal. She’d driven herself crazy picking the perfect gown from the Lillie Rubin shop in Nashville, which catered to women at least twice her age, and when Elvis complimented her footwear (“Man, I love those shoes”), her $250 splurge suddenly seemed worth every penny. Tanya was too nervous to notice, but LaCosta later said, “Oh, God, Tanya, when you turned your head, he was lookin’ you up and down. He thought you were sexy.” All Tanya knew was that it was a great night.
Soon, someone reminded him that it was time to get ready, and Elvis made his move. “Tanya, you want to come back for the second show?”
“Oh, no, sir,” she said, suddenly thirteen again. “I’ve got to go home and tell my mama and daddy about this.” Elvis reached over to kiss her, but his young guest surprised him.
“I just gave him the old side cheek, you know? And he laughed so big and hard when I did that. He thought that was just amazing. Who does that to Elvis Presley?”
He never forgot her, and two years later, as her professional star continued to ascend, he sent her a TLC necklace through Tony Brown, who Beau had once fired from Tanya’s band. Tanya had continued to go to Elvis’s shows and swoon from her seat, but she had too much of her father in her to graciously accept her gift. “Tell Elvis if he wants to be giving me something, he needs to come give it to me himself.” Today, the mother of a daughter named Presley, she cringes at the memory. “Oh, my God, how stupid! Just too cocky for my own good.”
Getting the brush-off from yet another teenager seemed to drive forty-year-old Elvis back to women of a more appropriate age range, and before the year was out, he took his wildest shot of all. Hearing that Sonny and Cher had just divorced, Elvis placed a call to the ex-Mrs. Bono, then twenty-nine, and invited her for a weekend in Las Vegas. Cher, who had watched his famous 1957 Pan Pacific Auditorium show standing on her chair as a child, was flabbergasted.
“My assistant told me he was on the phone, and at first I thought it was a joke. But I was just too frightened. He’d never stopped being an influence on my life, and sometimes you meet your heroes, and you’re really disappointed. I thought it would be much better to just have this fantasy about who he was than to be utterly disappointed.”
As his depression deepened, he spent money like it was never going to stop coming in. He had three airplanes now, including a $500,000 Aero Jet Commander, and then he bought fourteen Cadillacs in one day, to the tune of $140,000. Minnie Mae cautioned him that if he didn’t stop such craziness, he was going to end up penniless, but he waved her off with a hug and a smile. “It just means I have to do a longer tour,” he said. But then every time he did a tour, every woman he knew got expensive jewelry.
“He always gave girls rings,” says Shirley Dieu. “That was so common. Oh, my God, we had a ring on every finger. I’ll tell you how much jewelry I had. I remember going to Pip’s, which was Hefner’s private club